Using data-driven models to simulate the performance of surfactants in reducing heavy oil viscosity

There is a substantial body of literature exploring the challenges associated with exploring and exploiting these underground resources. Unconventional resources, particularly heavy oil reservoirs, are critical for meeting ever-increasing global energy demand. By injecting surfactants into heavy oil, chemically enhanced oil recovery (EOR) may enable emulsification, which may reduce the viscosity of heavy oil and facilitate extraction and transportation. In this work, a large experimental dataset, containing 2020 data points, was extracted from the literature for modeling oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion viscosity using machine learning (ML) methods. The algorithms used pressure, temperature, salinity, surfactant concentration, type of surfactant, shear rate, and crude oil density as inputs. For this purpose, five ML algorithms were selected and optimized, including adaptive boosting (AB), convolutional neural network (CNN), ensemble learning (EL), artificial neural network (ANN), and decision tree (DT). A combined simulated annealing (CSA) method was utilized to optimize all algorithms. With AARE, R², MAE, MSE, and RMSE values of 8.982, 0.996, 0.004, 0.0002, and 0.0132, respectively, the ANN predictor exhibited higher accuracy in predicting O/W emulsion viscosity for total data (train and test subsets combined). A Monte-Carlo sensitivity analysis was also performed to determine the impact of input features on the model output. By using the proposed ML predictor, expensive and time-consuming experiments can be eliminated and emulsion viscosity predictions can be expedited without the need for costly experiment.