An Artificial Intelligence Neural Networks Driven Approach to Forecast Production in Unconventional Reservoirs – Comparative Analysis with Decline Curve

Abstract Subsurface engineers pivot on surveillance of reservoir performance for future production rates and plan the optimization strategies at earliest. There are some techniques preferred for unconventional reservoirs such as numerical simulation and decline curve analysis (DCA) for production forecasting, but the uncertainty of uneconomical well test data often occurs in unconventional resources. Moreover, reservoir engineers can also hit a tailback in optimizing and tuning the model. Further, for DCA this approach is only appropriate for well/reservoir that are under boundary dominant flow regime, whereas fracture dominant flow regime is often observed for a longer period in unconventional hydraulically fractured reservoirs. Therefore, to resolve this issue, oil & gas industry (O&G) can adopt AI (Artificial Intelligence) based Algorithms for production forecasting. This paper presents a data-driven algorithm, known as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), along with time series forecasting that is a well-known statistical technique. Machine learning model trained by a past well performance data such as tubing head pressure (THP), flowing bottom-hole pressure can predict future production rates. This can be an efficient technique for subsurface engineers to monitor and optimize well performance. Time series neural networks were used for training the model at top and bottom node of the well with variating pressures in the past. After training and validation, the model predicted a target parameter that was gas rate. ANNs are inspired by biological neurons that are present in human brain, a powerful computing tool to make decisions after fueling itself with data. Moreover, prediction (t+1) nonlinear automated regression is preferred for accurate step ahead. Production rates and constraints of unconventional reservoirs were used to train the model. In our results, the NN based model gave the co-efficient of determination (R2) of 0.996 that shows nearly an exact precision. Furthermore, the values generated from NN Model and Arp's decline curve calculations were plotted for validation and it turned out that ANN can accurately predict the parameters. The Neural Network model is a novel approach for production forecasting, of unconventional reservoirs and help engineers in corporate decision making. This approach can mitigate the need of uneconomical well test operations and further provide confidence to production engineers in terms of data and result expectations.

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