Patent ID: 8571688

Claim:
A method, comprising: controlling a lift-gas compression process associated with multiple wells using a lift-gas compression process control system, the lift-gas compression process comprising a compressor that compresses a lift gas for injection of compressed lift gas between wellheads and processing equipment to facilitate lifting of material from one or more reservoirs associated with the wells; controlling a lift-gas extraction process associated with the multiple wells using a lift-gas extraction process control system; controlling a production separation process using a production separation process control system, the production separation process comprising a separator, wherein operation of the separator in the production separation process affects operation of the compressor in the lift-gas compression process; receiving process-related data associated with at least one of: one or more of the processes and the material from the one or more reservoirs; and optimizing the lift-gas compression process control system, the lift-gas extraction process control system, and the production separation process control system based on the process-related data, wherein the optimizing comprises optimizing a gas lift rate for each of the wells by accepting an optimal gas lift rate as a quadratic optimization target for each gas lift rate, the quadratic optimization target determined based on differences between actual and desired resting values of multiple controlled variables and multiple manipulated variables; wherein the processing equipment includes equipment performing the lift-gas extraction process and the production separation process; and wherein the manipulated variables include a number of wells, a compressor discharge pressure, and a compressor speed.