Enhanced oil recovery by nanoparticles flooding: From numerical modeling improvement to machine learning prediction

Nowadays, enhanced oil recovery using nanoparticles is considered an innovative approach to increase oil production. This paper focuses on predicting nanoparticles transport in porous media using machine learning techniques including random forest, gradient boosting regression, decision tree, and artificial neural networks. Due to the lack of data on nanoparticles transport in porous media, this work generates artificial datasets using a numerical model that are validated against experimental data from the literature. Six experiments with different nanoparticles types with various physical features are selected to validate the numerical model. Therefore, the researchers produce six datasets from the experiments and create an additional dataset by combining all other datasets. Also, data preprocessing, correlation, and features importance methods are investigated using the Scikit-learn library. Moreover, hyperparameters tuning are optimized using the GridSearchCV algorithm. The performance of predictive models is evaluated using the mean absolute error, the R-squared correlation, the mean squared error, and the root mean squared error. The results show that the decision tree model has the best performance and highest accuracy in one of the datasets. On the other hand, the random forest model has the lowest root mean squared error and highest R-squared values in the rest of the datasets, including the combined dataset.Cited as: Alwated, B., El-Amin, M.F. Enhanced oil recovery by nanoparticles flooding: From numerical modeling improvement to machine learning prediction. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2021, 5(3): 297-317, doi: 10.46690/ager.2021.03.0

Data Analysis and Neuro-Fuzzy Technique for EOR Screening : Application in Angolan Oilfields

This study is sponsored by the Angolan National Oil Company (Sonangol EP) and the authors are grateful for their support and the permission to use the data and publish this manuscriptPeer reviewedPublisher PD

4D Seismic History Matching Incorporating Unsupervised Learning

The work discussed and presented in this paper focuses on the history matching of reservoirs by integrating 4D seismic data into the inversion process using machine learning techniques. A new integrated scheme for the reconstruction of petrophysical properties with a modified Ensemble Smoother with Multiple Data Assimilation (ES-MDA) in a synthetic reservoir is proposed. The permeability field inside the reservoir is parametrised with an unsupervised learning approach, namely K-means with Singular Value Decomposition (K-SVD). This is combined with the Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) technique which is very typical for sparsity promoting regularisation schemes. Moreover, seismic attributes, in particular, acoustic impedance, are parametrised with the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). This novel combination of techniques from machine learning, sparsity regularisation, seismic imaging and history matching aims to address the ill-posedness of the inversion of historical production data efficiently using ES-MDA. In the numerical experiments provided, I demonstrate that these sparse representations of the petrophysical properties and the seismic attributes enables to obtain better production data matches to the true production data and to quantify the propagating waterfront better compared to more traditional methods that do not use comparable parametrisation techniques

Big Data in the Oil and Gas Industry: A Promising Courtship

The energy industry remains one of the highest money-producing and investment industries in the world. The United States’ own economic stability depends greatly on the stability of oil and gas prices. Various factors affect the amount of money that will continue to be invested in producing oil. A main disadvantage to the oil and gas industry is its lack of technological adaptation. This weakens the industry because the surest measures are not currently being taken to produce oil in optimally efficient, safe, and cost-effective ways. Big data has gained global recognition as an opportunity to gather large volumes of information in real-time and translate data sets into actionable insights. In a low commodity price environment, saving time, reducing costs, and improving safety are crucial outcomes that can be realized using machine learning in oil and gas operations. Big data provides the opportunity to use unsupervised learning. For example, with this approach, engineers can predict oil wells’ optimal barrels of production given the completion data in a specific area. However, a caveat to utilizing big data in the oil and gas industry is that there simply is neither enough physical data nor data velocity in the industry to be properly referred to as “big data.” Big data, as it develops, will nonetheless significantly change the energy business in the future, as it already has in various other industries.Petroleum and Geosystems Engineerin

Evaluation of CO2 Injection in Shale Gas Reservoirs through Numerical Reservoir Simulation and Supervised Machine Learning

CO2 geological storage is an important means to decarbonize the economy, but also expensive in field applications. CO2 injection into shale gas reservoirs can significantly increase the economic incentive by enhancing shale gas production through CO2 preferential adsorption in shales. This work presents a practical framework to evaluate and predict the CO2 adsorption process and CH4 production in shales through a combination of numerical reservoir simulation and supervised machine learning

Reducing Minimum Miscibility Pressure in Gas Injection for Enhanced Oil Recovery

This research presents a novel experimental investigation to reduce the minimum miscibility pressure in methane-oil systems using chemical additives

Application of LF-NMR measurements and supervised learning regression methods for improved characterization of heavy oils and bitumens

This work studies the physicochemical properties of unconventional hydrocarbon resources such as heavy oils and bitumens. The principal methods used in the research consisted of LF-NMR experiments, hypothesis testing, and statistical and data-driven modeling. The research output consists of several machine learning and analytical models capable of predicting heavy oil and bitumen viscosity and core sample water saturation with high accuracy. These results provide a strong case for in-situ LF-NMR applications in well logging

Screening reservoir candidates for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in Angolan offshore projects.

The neuro-fuzzy (NF) approach presented in this work is based on five (5) layered feedforward backpropagation algorithm applied for technical screening of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods. Associated reservoir rock-fluid oilfield data from successful EOR projects were used as input and predicted output in the training and validation processes, respectively. The developed model was then tested by using data set from Block B of an Angolan oilfield. The results of the sensitivity analysis between the Mamdani and the Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) approach incorporated in the algorithm has shown the robustness of the TSK ANFIS (Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System) approach in comparison to the other approach for the prediction of a suitable EOR technique. The simulation test results showed that the model presented in this study can be used for technical selection of suitable EOR techniques. Within the area investigated (Block B, Angola) polymer, hydrocarbon gas, and combustion were identified as the suitable techniques for EOR