Modeling Viscosity of CO₂-N₂ Gaseous Mixtures Using Robust Tree-Based Techniques: Extra Tree, Random Forest, GBoost,...

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) has an essential role in most enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods in the oil industry. Oil swelling and viscosity reduction are the dominant mechanisms in an immiscible CO₂-EOR process. Besides numerous CO₂ applications in EOR, most oil reservoirs do not have access to natural CO₂, and capturing it from flue gas and other sources is costly. Flue gases are available in huge quantities at a significantly lower price and can be considered economically viable agents for EOR operations. In this work, four powerful machine learning algorithms, namely, extra tree (ET), random forest (RF), gradient boosting (GBoost), and light gradient boosted machine (LightGBM) were utilized to accurately estimate the viscosity of CO₂-N₂ mixtures. To this aim, a databank was employed, containing 3036 data points over wide ranges of pressures and temperatures. Temperature, pressure, and CO₂ mole fraction were applied as input parameters, and the viscosity of the CO₂-N₂ mixture was the output. The RF smart model had the highest precision with the lowest average absolute percent relative error (AAPRE) of 1.58%, root mean square error (RMSE) of 2.221, and determination coefficient (R ²) of 0.9993. The trend analysis showed that the RF model could precisely predict the real physical behavior of the CO₂-N₂ viscosity variation. Finally, the outlier detection was performed using the leverage approach to demonstrate the validity of the utilized databank and the applicability area of the developed RF model. Accordingly, nearly 96% of the data points seemed to be dependable and valid, and the rest of them were located in the suspected and out-of-leverage data zones.