Geared toward the problems of predicting the unsteadily changing single oil well production in water flooding reservoir, a machine learning model based on CNN (convolutional neural network) and LSTM (long short-term memory) is established which realizes precise predictions of monthly single-well production. This study is considering more than 60 dynamic and static factors that affect the changes of oil well production, introduce water injection parameters into data set, select 11 main control factors, and then, build a CNN-LSTM model optimized by Bayesian optimization. The effectiveness of the proposed model is verified in a realistic reservoir. The experiment results show that the prediction accuracy of the proposed model is over 90%, which suggests a penitential application in an extensive range of applications. Production forecasting by the developed model is simple, efficient, and accurate, which can provide a guidance for the dynamic analysis of a water flooding reservoir, and work as a good reference of the development and production of other types of reservoirs.

Production forecasting plays an important role in development plans during the entire period of petroleum exploration and development. Artificial intelligence has been extensively investigated in recent years because of its capacity to extensively analyze and interpret complex data. With the emergence of spatiotemporal models that can integrate graph convolutional networks (GCN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN), it is now possible to achieve multi-well production prediction by considering the impact of interactions between producers and historical production data simultaneously. Moreover, an accurate prediction not only depends on historical production data but also on the influence of neighboring injectors’ historical gas injection rate (GIR). Therefore, based on the assumption that introducing GIR can enhance prediction accuracy, this paper proposes a deep learning-based hybrid production forecasting model that is aimed at considering both the spatiotemporal characteristics of producers and the GIR of neighboring injectors. Specifically, we integrated spatiotemporal characteristics and GIR into an attribute-augmented spatiotemporal graph convolutional network (AST-GCN) and gated recurrent units (GRU) neural network to extract intricate temporal correlations from historical data. The method proposed in this paper has been successfully applied in a well pattern (including five producers and seven gas injectors) in a low-permeability carbonate reservoir in the Middle East. In single well production forecasting, the error of AST-GCN is 63.2%, 37.3%, and 16.1% lower in MedAE, MAE, and RMSE compared with GRU and 62.9%, 44.6%, and 28.9% lower compared with RNS. Similarly, the accuracy of AST-GCN is 15.9% and 35.8% higher than GRU and RNS in single well prediction. In well-pattern production forecasting, the error of AST-GCN is 41.2%, 64.2%, and 75.2% lower in RMSE, MAE, and MedAE compared with RNS, while the accuracy of AST-GCN is 29.3% higher. After different degrees of Gaussian noise are added to the actual data, the average change in AST-GCN is 3.3%, 0.4%, and 1.2% in MedAE, MAE, and RMSE, which indicates the robustness of the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model can consider the production data, gas injection data, and spatial correlation at the same time, which performs well in oil production forecasts.

Production prediction continues to play an increasingly significant role in reservoir development adjustment and optimization, especially in water-alternating-gas (WAG) flooding. As artificial intelligence continues to develop, data-driven machine learning method can establish a robust model based on massive data to clarify development risks and challenges, predict development dynamic characteristics in advance. This study gathers over 15 years actual data from targeted carbonate reservoir and establishes a robust Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network prediction model based on correlation analysis, data cleaning, feature variables selection, hyper-parameters optimization and model evaluation to forecast oil production, gas-oil ratio (GOR), and water cut (WC) of WAG flooding. In comparison to traditional reservoir numerical simulation (RNS), LSTM neural networks have a huge advantage in terms of computational efficiency and prediction accuracy. The calculation time of LSTM method is 864% less than reservoir numerical simulation method, while prediction error of LSTM method is 261% less than RNS method. We classify producers into three types based on the prediction results and propose optimization measures aimed at the risks and challenges they faced. Field implementation indicates promising outcome with better reservoir support, lower GOR, lower WC, and stabler oil production. This study provides a novel direction for application of artificial intelligence in WAG flooding development and optimization.

The efficient development of oil reservoirs mainly depends on the comprehensive optimization of the subsurface fluid flow process. As an intelligent analysis technique, artificial intelligence provides a novel solution to multi-objective optimization (MOO) problems. In this study, an intelligent agent model based on the Transformer framework with the assistance of the multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm has been utilized to optimize the gas flooding injection–production parameters in a well pattern in the Middle East. Firstly, 10 types of surveillance data covering 12 years from the target reservoir were gathered to provide a data foundation for model training and analysis. The prediction performance of the Transformer model reflected its higher accuracy compared to traditional reservoir numerical simulation (RNS) and other intelligent methods. The production prediction results based on the Transformer model were 21, 12, and 4 percentage points higher than those of RNS, bagging, and the bi-directional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) in terms of accuracy, and it showed similar trends in the gas–oil ratio (GOR) prediction results. Secondly, the Pareto-based MOPSO algorithm was utilized to fulfil the two contradictory objectives of maximizing oil production and minimizing GOR simultaneously. After 10,000 iterations, the optimal injection–production parameters were proposed based on the generated Pareto frontier. To validate the feasibility and superiority of the developed approach, the development effects of three injection–production schemes were predicted in the intelligent agent model. In the next 400 days of production, the cumulative oil production increased by 25.3% compared to the average distribution method and 12.7% compared to the reservoir engineering method, while GOR was reduced by 27.1% and 15.3%, respectively. The results show that MOPSO results in a strategy that more appropriately optimizes oil production and GOR compared to some previous efforts published in the literature. The injection–production parameter optimization method based on the intelligent agent model and MOPSO algorithm can help decision makers to update the conservative development strategy and improve the development effect.