Predicting scale deposition in oil reservoirs using machine learning optimization algorithms

Scale deposition, a form of formation damage, not only affects the reservoir but also damages the well and equipment. This phenomenon occurs due to changes in temperature, pressure, and the injection of incompatible salt water, leading to ionic reactions. This study investigated permeability reduction due to scale deposition and examined how parameters such as temperature, pressure drop, and ion concentration affect the prediction accuracy. The scale deposits investigated in this study include CaSO4, BaSO4, and SrSO4. This paper uses Python to employ different machine-learning algorithms to predict the results. Each machine learning model has certain hyper-parameters that need adjustment. Failure to do so will result in reduced accuracy and incomplete interpretation of input data. The accuracy of the support vector regression (SVR) algorithm was significantly affected by the variation of the epsilon parameter in the dataset used. Therefore, before hyperparameter optimization, SVR had the lowest accuracy at 0.575. After adjusting the hyper-parameters, our findings show that SVR had the highest increase in R-squared value, which was 0.900, and the most minor growth in KNN, which went from 0.995 to 0.996. Additionally, the highest accuracy value for K-Nearest Neighbor is 0.996. Furthermore, most errors were related to SVR and XGBoost algorithms, while the most negligible errors were for the Decision Tree and KNN algorithms.