Prediction of Dead Oil Viscosity: Machine Learning vs. Classical Correlations

Dead oil viscosity is a critical parameter to solve numerous reservoir engineering problems and one of the most unreliable properties to predict with classical black oil correlations. Determination of dead oil viscosity by experiments is expensive and time-consuming, which means developing an accurate and quick prediction model is required. This paper implements six machine learning models: random forest (RF), lightgbm, XGBoost, multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network, stochastic real-valued (SRV) and SuperLearner to predict dead oil viscosity. More than 2000 pressure–volume–temperature (PVT) data were used for developing and testing these models. A huge range of viscosity data were used, from light intermediate to heavy oil. In this study, we give insight into the performance of different functional forms that have been used in the literature to formulate dead oil viscosity. The results show that the functional form f ( γ A P I , T ) , has the best performance, and additional correlating parameters might be unnecessary. Furthermore, SuperLearner outperformed other machine learning (ML) algorithms as well as common correlations that are based on the metric analysis. The SuperLearner model can potentially replace the empirical models for viscosity predictions on a wide range of viscosities (any oil type). Ultimately, the proposed model is capable of simulating the true physical trend of the dead oil viscosity with variations of oil API gravity, temperature and shear rate.