Surrogate-Based Analysis of Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery – A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Model Performance

Abstract

Optimizing decision and design variables for Chemical EOR is imperative for sensitivity and uncertainty analysis. However, these processes involve multiple reservoir simulation runs which increase computational cost and time. Surrogate models are capable of overcoming this impediment as they are capable of mimicking the capabilities of full field three-dimensional reservoir simulation models in detail and complexity. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and regression-based Design of Experiments (DoE) are common methods for surrogate modelling. In this study, a comparative analysis of data-driven surrogate model performance on Recovery Factor (RF) for Surfactant-Polymer flooding is investigated with seven input variables including Kv/Kh ratio, polymer concentration in polymer drive, surfactant slug size, surfactant concentration in surfactant slug, polymer concentration in surfactant slug, polymer drive size and salinity of polymer drive. Eleven Machine learning models including Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Ridge and Lasso regression; Support Vector Regression (SVR), ANN as well as Classification and Regression Tree (CART) based algorithms including Decision Trees, Random Forest, eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Gradient Boosting and Extremely Randomized Trees (ERT), are applied on a dataset consisting of 202 datapoints. The results obtained indicate high model performance and accuracy for SVR, ANN and CART based ensemble techniques like Extremely Randomized Trees, Gradient Boost and XGBoost regression, with high R2 values and lowest Mean Squared Error (MSE) values for the training and test dataset. Unlike other studies on Chemical EOR surrogate modelling where sensitivity was analyzed with statistical DoE, we rank the input features using Decision Tree-based algorithms while model interpretability is achieved with Shapely Values. Results from feature ranking indicate that surfactant concentration, and slug size are the most influential parameters on the RF. Other important factors, though with less influence, are the polymer concentration in surfactant slug, polymer concentration in polymer drive and polymer drive size. The salinity of the polymer drive and the Kv/Kh ratio both have a negative effect on the RF, with a corresponding least level of significance.