Upscaling Shear Strength of Heterogeneous Oil Sands with Interbedded Shales Using Artificial Neural Network

Understanding the shear strength of caprock shale and oil sands is important in risk assessment of slope stability in open -pit mining, caprock integrity of in- situ thermal recovery, and optimization of bitumen production from oil sands. A robust and efficient upscaling technique is essential to model the impact of heterogeneity on the deformation and failure of oil sands and caprock shale. Although con-ventional analytical and numerical upscaling techniques are available, many of these methods consider oversimplified assumptions and have high computational costs, especially when considering the impact of spatially correlated interbedded shales on the shear strength. A machine learning enhanced upscaling (MLEU) technique that leverages the accuracy of local numerical upscaling and the efficiency of artificial neural network (ANN) is proposed here. MLEU uses a fast and accurate ANN proxy model to predict the anisotropic shear strength of heterogeneous oil sands with interbedded shales. The R-2 values of the trained ANN models exceed 0.94 for estimating shear strengths in horizontal and vertical directions. The deviation of upscaled shear strength from numerical upscaled results is improved by 12-76% compared with multivariate regression methods like response surface methodology (RSM) and polynomial chaos expansion (PCE). In terms of computational efficiency, the proposed MLEU method can save computational effort by two orders of magnitude compared with numerical upscaling. MLEU provides a reasonable estimate of anisotropic shear strength while considering uncertainties caused by different distributions of shale beddings. With the increasing demand for regional scale modeling of geomechanical problems, the proposed MLEU technique can be extended to other geological settings, where weak beddings play a significant role and the impact of heterogeneity on shear strength is important.