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Article in Energy Sources Part A Recovery Utilization and Environmental Effects July 2012
DOI: 10.1080/15567036.2010.492386
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To cite this article: A. Mirzaei-Paiaman & S. Salavati (2012): The Application of Artificial Neural
Networks for the Prediction of Oil Production Flow Rate, Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization,
and Environmental Effects, 34:19, 1834-1843
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Energy Sources, Part A, 34:18341843, 2012
Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1556-7036 print/1556-7230 online
DOI: 10.1080/15567036.2010.492386
Abstract Estimation of oil production flow rate, where direct rate measurement is
not feasible, is a challenge faced by petroleum engineers in some fields throughout
the world. In such situations, oil flow rate is commonly estimated using empirical
correlations. In some cases, significant error is inherent in application of the empirical
correlations and yields inaccurate results. This study presents a new methodology
for prediction of oil flow rate in two-phase flow of oil and gas through wellhead
chokes using the artificial neural network technique. The developed model predicts
oil flow rate as functions of choke upstream pressure, choke size, and producing gas
to oil ratio. The accuracy of the developed model was compared with some popular
empirical correlations. Results of comparison showed that oil flow rates predicted by
the new model are in excellent agreement with actual measured data.
Keywords artificial neural network, empirical correlation, oil flow rate, two-phase
flow, wellhead choke
1. Introduction
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are mathematical or computational models that try to
simulate the structure and/or functional aspects of biological neural networks. They can
be used to model complex relationships between inputs and outputs or to find patterns in
data. Fundamentals of ANNs have been fully discussed in the literature (e.g., Anderson
and Rosenfeld, 1989). ANN research dates back to a research by McCulloch and Pitts
(1943). Since then, ANNs have been widely used to model some of the human activities
in many areas of science and engineering, such as aerospace, automotive, electronics,
manufacturing, petroleum engineering, etc. (Hagan et al., 1997).
Petroleum engineers have shown a high degree of open-mindedness in utilizing
new technologies from different disciplines to solve old and new petroleum engineering
problems. The key in using ANN in petroleum engineering is to observe, recognize,
and define problems in a way that will be addressable by neural nets (Mohaghegh and
Ameri, 1995). It seems that the first application of ANNs in petroleum engineering
emerged in 1993 by Juniardi and Ershaghi. In the last two decades, ANN has been
1834
ANN and Flow Rate Prediction 1835
which makes them difficult to apply, because in the petroleum industry gathering too
many parameters for inclusion in theoretical correlations is costly and time consuming.
Also, empirical correlations are limited in range of data used in their development
stage. This means that empirical correlations may yield acceptable results only in similar
circumstances where the range of data is like the range of data used in the development
stage of correlations. Therefore, these correlations lack the generalization capability.
Generally, using this type of correlation is preferred to theoretical-type correlations.
The most popular correlations are those proposed by Gilbert (1954), Baxendell (1957),
Ros (1960), and Achong (1961). Also, the newest empirical correlation is proposed by
Mirzaei-Paiaman (in press).
Application of published empirical correlations by production engineers may usually
be a misleading tool, since due to significant errors of the majority of these correlations,
accurate estimation of oil flow rate is not easily reached. Therefore, estimation of oil
flow rate where direct rate measurement is not feasible is a challenge faced by petroleum
engineers in some fields throughout the world. In this study, to overcome the mentioned
problem, a new methodology is presented to predict oil flow rate in two-phase flow of oil
and gas through wellhead chokes using ANN technique. To do this, accurately measured
field production test data from 62 wells in 15 producing fields in the South West of Iran,
Northern Persian Gulf, were used. The majority of the fields are of the biggest Persian
fields.
2. Methodology
A multilayer perceptron neural network, as the most widely used neural networks (Bhatt,
2002), was employed and back propagation algorithm (Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986),
as one type of feed-forward and supervised ANN, was selected as a learning rule.
From the previous works done (e.g., Al-Towalib and Al-Marhoun 1994), it has been
established that oil flow rate is a function of several factors. In general, these factors are
the choke upstream pressure, choke size, producing gas to oil ratio, and gas and oil specific
gravities. Mirzaei-Paiaman (in press) showed that the oil flow rate is fairly insensitive to
gas and oil specific gravities and documented that only the other three remaining factors
are dominant factors controlling oil flow rate. Therefore, in this research, choke upstream
pressure, choke size, and producing gas to oil ratio are set as the input parameters for the
ANN model and oil flow rate is set as the output parameter. The effect of choke upstream
pressure, choke size, and producing gas to oil ratio on oil flow rate is shown in Figures
1836 A. Mirzaei-Paiaman and S. Salavati
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1, 2, and 3, respectively. These figures show no clear meaningful relation between each
individual parameter and oil flow rate. The figures also show a scattering of data and
provide a good sense regarding the range of them.
Besides the inputs and output, the designed network consists of one hidden layer.
Generally, for most applications, one hidden layer is sufficient if enough hidden neurons
are used (Kim and Park, 1999). More than one hidden layer greatly increases the
amount of time required for training and testing without noticeable improvement in
performance. The number of neurons in the hidden layer was determined by a trial and
error process. Applying this process, it was found that four neurons is the optimum
number and causes the best convergence between the produced results and the training
data. Therefore, to summarize, the network consists of three layers, which are one
input layer (bearing three neurons), one hidden layer (bearing four neurons), and one
output layer (bearing one neuron), as depicted in Figure 4. In addition, transfer functions
for the hidden layer and output layer were set as tan-sigmoid and linear, respectively.
Finally, the designed network was trained using 134 sets of data. Range of used data
for the training stage is shown in Table 1. Figure 5 shows different steps of the ANN
methodology.
Table 1
Range of data used for training and testing stages
Table 2
Statistical parameters for the oil flow rate correlations
Mirzaei-
ANN Gilbert Ros Baxendell Achong Paiaman
Figure 6. Comparison of oil flow rate correlation coefficient for different correlations.
1840 A. Mirzaei-Paiaman and S. Salavati
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predicted values. If the agreement is perfect, then all points should lie on the unit slope
line (e.g., best fit line), indicating the excellent agreement between the actual and the
predicted values. The best plot is obtained for ANN data as shown in Figure 7.
4. Conclusion
The developed ANN model presented in this study gives better predictions and higher
accuracy for oil flow rate values. The presented model achieves the lowest average
ANN and Flow Rate Prediction 1841
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Figure 10. Cross plot of oil flow rate for Baxendell correlation.
absolute relative error, lowest minimum absolute relative error, lowest maximum absolute
relative error, and lowest average relative error. As well, the ANN model gives the most
favorable value for coefficient when compared to empirical correlations. Apart from its
accuracy, this model takes a shorter time to predict the oil flow rate when compared
with some empirical correlations that are including more than three input parameters.
The immediate reason for this may be due to fewer numbers of input parameters in the
ANN model (e.g., choke upstream pressure, choke size, and producing gas to oil ratio).
1842 A. Mirzaei-Paiaman and S. Salavati
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Figure 11. Cross plot of oil flow rate for Achong correlation.
Figure 12. Cross plot of oil flow rate for Mirzaei-Paiaman correlation.
Acknowledgment
The authors wish to thank the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and its subsidiary
company, National Iranian South Oil Company (NISOC), for their support during this
study.
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ANN and Flow Rate Prediction 1843
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