In this work, we investigate optimal control problems in heterogeneous porous media. Based on the partial differential equation constraint connecting the state and the control, we produce the associated control as a dependent quantity of the state. Then, we introduce the reduced optimal control problem which contains only the state variable. Here we employ $C^0$ interior penalty finite element methods for the spatial discretization to solve the reduced optimal control problem resulting in a fourth-order variational inequality. We provide a priori error estimates and stability analyses. Several numerical examples validate and illustrate the capabilities of the proposed algorithm.