Utilization of Artificial Neural Network in Predicting the Total Organic Carbon in Devonian Shale Using the Conventional Well Logs and the Spectral Gamma Ray

Due to high oil and gas production and consumption, unconventional reservoirs attracted significant interest. Total organic carbon (TOC) is a significant measure of the quality of unconventional resources. Conventionally, TOC is measured experimentally; however, continuous information about TOC is hard to obtain due to the samples' limitations, while the developed empirical correlations for TOC were found to have modest accuracy when applied in different datasets. In this paper, data from Devonian Duvernay shale were used to develop an optimized empirical correlation to predict TOC based on an artificial neural network (ANN). Three wells' datasets were used to build and validate the model containing over 1250 data points, and each data point includes values for TOC, density, porosity, resistivity, gamma ray and sonic transient time, and spectral gamma ray. The three datasets were used separately for training, testing, and validation. The results of the developed correlation were compared with three available models. A sensitivity and optimization test was performed to reach the best model in terms of average absolute percentage error (AAPE) and correlation coefficient (R) between the actual and predicted TOC. The new correlation yielded an excellent match with the actual TOC values with R values above 0.93 and AAPE values lower than 14%. In the validation dataset, the correlation outperformed the other empirical correlations and resulted in less than 10% AAPE, in comparison with over 20% AAPE in other models. These results imply the applicability of this correlation; therefore, all the correlation's parameters are reported to allow its use on different datasets.