Accurate determination of nano-confined minimum miscible pressure to aid CO2 enhanced oil recovery and storage in unconventional reservoirs

Abstract

The precise determination of minimum miscible pressure is of great importance for CO2 enhanced oil recovery and storage as it directly influences the efficiency of pore-scale oil displacement and CO2 trapping. In this study, an interpretable machine learning framework is developed, enabling the reliable evaluation of nano-confined minimum miscible pressure. Four machine learning algorithms (Random Forest, Multi-layer Perceptron, Support Vector Regression, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting) are employed to accurately predict the nano-confined minimum miscible pressure of a CO2-oil system. The results demonstrate that, excluding support vector regression, the determination coefficients for all models surpass 94%, signifying the robust predictive performance of our model. Subsequently, Shapley Additive exPlanations is used to analyze the feature importance ranking and the impact of each input feature on minimum miscible pressure in these models. Based on the interpretation results, our multi-layer perceptron model is superior in mining the input-output relationship and reflecting the petrophysical laws, rendering it highly suitable for predicting the minimum miscible pressure while considering nano-confinement. In addition, it is found that pore size significantly influences minimum miscible pressure prediction and that minimum miscible pressure decreases with decreasing pore size when the pore size is ≤75 nm. Single-factor sensitivity analysis is applied to validate the trend patterns between input features and minimum miscible pressure in the multi-layer perceptron model.

Document Type: Original article

Cited as: He, Y., Wei, B., Zhao, J. You, J., Kadet, V., Lu, J. Accurate determination of nano-confined minimum-miscible-pressure to aid CO2 enhanced oil recovery and storage in unconventional reservoirs. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2024, 12(2): 141-155. https://doi.org/10.46690/ager.2024.05.06

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