Machine learning insights to CO2-EOR and storage simulations through a five-spot pattern – a theoretical study

The utilization of CO2 flooding is a widely applied enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technique in mature onshore oil fields. As well as being able to increase oil production and recovery it offers the potential to provide long-term, geological storage for carbon in subsurface reservoirs, thereby contributing to the mitigation of carbon emissions originating from human activities. Substantial research efforts have provided some insight into the uncertainties associated with CO2-EOR projects, but further understanding and the development of more reliable methods are required to accurately predict the outcomes of the complex processes involved in CO2 reservoir flooding. In this study, four machine learning (ML) algorithms were developed to predict CO2 storage mass and cumulative oil production, using the CMG-GEM three-phase flow compositional reservoir simulator with nine reservoir input variables covering a range of uncertainties associated with oil zones. The Mahalanobis distance technique was applied for identifying and excluding outlier data points from the target variable distributions of training data groups. 520 and 439 data records were excluded from the CO2 storage quantity and cumulative oil production dataset, respectively, to generate more reliable predictions. Meticulous training and testing of the ML models revealed that, of the models evaluated, the LSSVM model generated the lowest prediction errors with the test dataset (RMSE = 0.7811 million mt for CO2 storage mass; RMSE = 10.1245 million barrels for cumulative oil production) demonstrating excellent generalization capabilities.