With the rapid progress of big data and artificial intelligence, machine learning technologies such as learning and adaptive control have emerged as a research focus in petroleum engineering. They have various applications in oilfield development, such as parameter prediction, optimization scheme deployment, and performance evaluation. This paper provides a comprehensive review of these applications in three key scenarios of petroleum engineering, namely hydraulic fracturing and acidizing, chemical flooding and gas flooding, and water injection. This article first introduces the steps and methods of machine learning processing in these scenarios, then discusses the advantages, disadvantages, existing challenges, and future prospects of these machine learning methods. Furthermore, this article compares and contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of these machine learning methods, aiming to help researchers select and improve their methods. Finally, this paper identifies some potential development trends and research directions of machine learning in petroleum engineering based on the current issues.

As a new heavy oil development technology, hot water chemistry flooding has great potential in offshore heavy oil fields development. In this paper, the adaptability of hot water chemical flooding was studied based on the typical model of offshore heavy oil fields. The main controlling factors affecting the hot water chemical flooding were analyzed and evaluated by single factor analysis. The technical boundary was established for offshore heavy oil fields. In addition, the hot water chemical flooding scheme was designed by a case study of a well group oilfield D. The results indicate that crude oil viscosity and well spacing have great influences on hot water chemical flooding performance. Hot water chemical flooding is favorable when the crude oil viscosity is between 300 and 1000 mPa·s and well spacing is around 200~400 m. The hot water chemical flooding scheme of the target well group results in tons of incremental oil, and 6.3% of recovery factor being enhanced, which shows strong evidence that hot water chemical flooding enables great oilfield development performance.