Enhanced intelligent approach for determination of crude oil viscosity at reservoir conditions

Oil viscosity plays a prominent role in all areas of petroleum engineering, such as simulating reservoirs, predicting production rate, evaluating oil well performance, and even planning for thermal enhanced oil recovery (EOR) that involves fluid flow calculations. Experimental methods of determining oil viscosity, such as the rotational viscometer, are more accurate than other methods. The compositional method can also properly estimate oil viscosity. However, the composition of oil should be determined experimentally, which is costly and time-consuming. Therefore, the occasional inaccessibility of experimental data may make it inevitable to look for convenient methods for fast and accurate prediction of oil viscosity. Hence, in this study, the error in viscosity prediction has been minimized by taking into account the amount of dissolved gas in oil (solution gas–oil ratio: R(s)) as a representative of oil composition along with other conventional black oil features including temperature, pressure, and API gravity by employing recently developed machine learning methods based on the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT): extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), CatBoost, and GradientBoosting. Moreover, the advantage of the proposed method lies in its independence to input viscosity data in each pressure region/stage. The results were then compared with well-known correlations and machine-learning methods employing the black oil approach applying least square support vector machine (LSSVM) and compositional approach implementing decision trees (DTs). XGBoost is offered as the best method with its greater precision and lower error. It provides an overall average absolute relative deviation (AARD) of 1.968% which has reduced the error of the compositional method by half and the black oil method (saturated region) by five times. This shows the proper viscosity prediction and corroborates the applied method's performance.