Prediction of CO2 Minimum Miscibility Pressure Using an Augmented Machine-Learning-Based Model
Authors: Sinha Utkarsh , Dindoruk Birol , Soliman Mohamed 
Published: March 2021

Minimum miscibility pressure (MMP) is one of the key design parameters for gas injection projects. It is a physical parameter that is a measure of local displacement efficiency while subject to some constraints due to its definition. Also, the MMP value is used to tune compositional models along with proper fluid description constrained with other available basic phase behavior data, such as bubble point pressure and volumetric properties. In general, carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrocarbon gases are the most common gases used for (or screened for) gas injection processes, and because of recent focus, they are used to screen for the coupling of CO2-sequestration and CO2-enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects. Because the CO2/oil phase behavior is quite different than the hydrocarbon gas/oil phase behavior, researchers developed specialized correlations for CO2 or CO2-rich streams. Therefore, there is a need for a tool with expanded range capabilities for the estimation of MMP for CO2 gas streams. The only known and widely accepted measurement technique for MMP that is coherent with its formal definition is the use of a slimtube apparatus. However, the use of slimtube restricts the amount of data available, even though there are other alternative techniques presented over the last three decades, which all have various limitations (Dindoruk et al. 2021). Due to some of the complexities highlighted in Dindoruk et al. (2021) and time and resource requirements, there have been a number of correlations developed in the literature using mostly classical regression techniques with relatively sparse data using various combinations of limited input data (Cronquist 1978; Lee 1979; Yellig and Metcalfe 1980; Alston et al. 1985; Glaso 1985; Jaubert et al. 1998; Emera and Sarma 2005; Yuan et al. 2005; Ahmadi et al. 2010; Ahmadi and Johns 2011). In this paper, we present two separate approaches for the calculation of the MMP of an oil for CO2 injection: analytical correlation in which the correlation coefficients were tuned using linear support vector machines (SVMs) (Press et al. 2007; MathWorks 2020; RDocumentation 2020b; Cortes and Vapnik 1995) and using a hybrid method (i.e., superlearner model), which consists of the combination of random forest (RF) regression (Breiman 2001) and the proposed analytical correlation. Both models take the compositional analysis of oils up to heptane plus fraction, molecular weight of oil, and the reservoir temperature as input parameters. Based on statistical and data analysis techniques in combination with the help of corresponding crossplots, we showed that the performance of the final proposed method (hybrid method) is superior to all the leading correlations (Cronquist 1978; Lee 1979; Yellig and Metcalfe 1980; Alston et al. 1985; Glaso 1985; Emera and Sarma 2005; Yuan et al. 2005) and supervised machine-learning (Metcalfe 1982) methods considered in the literature (Altman 1992; Chambers and Hastie 1992; Chapelle and Vapnik 2000; Breiman 2001; Press et al. 2007; MathWorks 2020). The proposed model works for the widest spectrum of MMPs from 1,000 to 4,900 psia, which covers the entire range of oils within the scope of CO2 EOR based on the widely used screening criteria (Taber et al. 1997a, 1997b).

NOTE: A correction notice has been issued for this paper and is available under the Supplementary Data section.