Application of machine learning in predicting oil rate decline for Bakken shale oil wells

Commercial reservoir simulators are required to solve discretized mass-balance equations. When the reservoir becomes heterogeneous and complex, more grid blocks can be used, which requires detailed and accurate reservoir information, for e.g. porosity, permeability, and other parameters that are not always available in the field. Predicting the EUR (Estimated Ultimate Recovery) and rate decline for a single well can therefore take hours or days, making them computationally expensive and time-consuming. In contrast, decline curve models are a simpler and speedier option because they only require a few variables in the equation that can be easily gathered from the wells' current data. The well data for this study was gathered from the Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation's publicly accessible databases. The SEDM (Stretched Exponential Decline Model) decline curve equation variables specifically designed for unconventional reservoirs variables were correlated to the predictor parameters in a random oil field well data set. The study examined the relative influences of several well parameters. The study's novelty comes from developing an innovative machine learning (ML) (random forest (RF)) based model for fast rate-decline and EUR prediction in Bakken Shale oil wells. The successful application of this study relies highly on the availability of good quality and quantity of the dataset.