AI-Based Estimation of Hydraulic Fracturing Effect

Summary We studied the applicability of a gradient-boosting machine-learning (ML) algorithm for forecasting of oil and total liquid production after hydraulic fracturing (HF). A thorough raw data study with data preprocessing algorithms was provided. The data set included 10 oil fields with more than 2,000 HF events. Each event has been characterized by well coordinates, geology, transport and storage properties, depths, and oil/liquid rates before fracturing for target and neighboring wells. Each ML model has been trained to predict monthly production rates right after fracturing and when the flows are stabilized. The gradient-boosting method justified its choice with R2 being approximately 0.7 to 0.8 on the test set for oil/total liquid production after HF. The developed ML prediction model does not require preliminary numerical simulations of a future HF design. The applied algorithm could be used as a new approach for HF candidate selection based on the real-time state of the field.