Virtual flow predictor using deep neural networks

Abstract

Multiphase flowmeters are important to monitor oil wells, as they allow operators to obtain a real-time estimate of the production. However, due to its high installation cost, uncertainty, and reading errors, the oil and gas industry started to invest in virtual meters, mathematical models that can obtain the oil and gas flow forecast using the instrumentation already available in the well, such as pressure and temperature sensors. The purpose of this article is to develop a virtual multiphase flow predictor using artificial intelligence models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gate Recurrent Units (GRU), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural networks and deep learning. As input data, this paper uses a public database available on the Oil and Gas Authority (UK) to train the models and demonstrate the possibility of predicting multiphase flow with a reasonable error margin, proving that the method is efficient in estimating well production rates.