Abstract
Accurate knowledge of Pressure-Volume-Temperature (PVT) properties is crucial in reservoir and production engineering computational applications. One of these properties is the oil formation volume factor (Bo), which assumes a significant role in calculating some of the prominent petroleum engineering terms and parameters, such as depletion rate, oil in place, reservoir simulation, material balance equation, well testing, reservoir production calculation, etc. These properties are ideally measured experimentally in the laboratory, based on downhole or recommended surface samples. Faster and cheaper methods are important for real-time decision making and empirically developed correlations are used in the prediction of this property. This work is aimed at developing a more accurate prediction method than the more common methods. The prediction method used is based on a supervised deep neural network to estimate oil formation volume factor at bubble point pressure as a function of gas-oil ratio, gas gravity, specific oil gravity, and reservoir temperature. Deep learning is applied in this paper to address the inaccuracy of empirically derived correlations used for predicting oil formation volume factor. Neural Networks would help us find hidden patterns in the data, which cannot be found otherwise. A multi-layer neural network was used for the prediction via the anaconda programming environment. Two frameworks for modelling data using deep learning viz: TensorFlow and Keras were utilized, and PVT variables selected as input neurons while employing early stopping which uses a part of our data not fed to the model to test its performance to prevent overfitting. In the modelling process, 2994 dataset retrieved from the Niger Delta region was used. The dataset was randomly divided into three parts of which 60% was used for training, 20% for validation, and 20% for testing. The result predicted by the network outperformed existing correlations by the statistical parameters used for the same set of field data. The network has a mean average error of 0.05 which is the lowest when compared to the error generated by other correlation models. The predictive capability of this network is found to be higher than existing models, based on the findings of this work.