Computational modeling study demonstrates rapid evaluation of CO2 storage and oil recovery in heterogeneous reservoirs, indicating radial basis function networks outperform deep neural networks.
Under China’s carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, CO 2 capture, utilization, and storage provides an important pathway for simultaneously improving oil recovery and reducing carbon emissions in mature oilfields. For heterogeneous conglomerate, tight, and mature reservoirs , rapid evaluation of CO 2 injection schemes is challenging because high-fidelity numerical simulation is computationally expensive and available training samples are often limited. This study develops a radial basis function (RBF) network-based surrogate, which is a purely data-driven table lookup interpretation model, to evaluate the coupled performance of CO 2 enhanced oil recovery and geological storage. A total of 162 high fidelity simulation cases were generated through full-factorial design, covering different water-cut stages, permeability levels, heterogeneity conditions, and injection strategies, including continuous CO 2 injection and five water-alternating-gas ratios. Monthly cumulative oil production and cumulative CO 2 storage were used as prediction targets. A thin-plate spline RBF interpolator was constructed and compared with a deep neural network benchmark trained using the same dataset and testing strategy. Blind testing shows that the RBF model achieves endpoint R 2 values of 0.8952 for cumulative oil production and 0.9402 for CO 2 storage, while the corresponding DNN values are only 0.5288 and 0.6329. For full monthly time-series prediction, the RBF model obtains R 2 values above 0.96 for both targets, clearly outperforming the DNN in accuracy, stability, and smoothness of cumulative prediction curves. The RBF surrogate was further coupled with a net present value module to construct decision matrices across oil-price and CO 2 -cost conditions. Results indicate that continuous gas injection is favorable in relatively homogeneous reservoirs under low CO 2 -cost conditions, whereas WAG schemes become increasingly advantageous as heterogeneity or CO 2 cost increases. In strongly heterogeneous reservoirs, WAG schemes dominate most of the economic decision space because they improve sweep efficiency and reduce early gas breakthrough risk. The proposed workflow provides a data-efficient and computationally practical tool for early-stage CO 2 -EOR-storage screening and injection-strategy selection.
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Zhou et al. (2026) studied this question.
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