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Understanding Oil Formation Volume Factor βo is crucial for effective oil field development, impacting well performance analysis, reservoir simulation, and production engineering calculations. Traditionally, βo is determined through costly and time-consuming laboratory tests, prompting the need for accurate mathematical correlations. Existing correlations such as Vasquez-Beggs, Standing-Glaso, and others have been widely used but show varying degrees of accuracy across different operating conditions. In this study, these correlations were evaluated against 95 datasets of experimental βo data for Sudanese crude oils. Statistical analysis revealed that Vasquez-Beggs and Standing- Glaso models performed best, with average absolute errors of 3.4219 and 3.4477, and correlation coefficients of 0.7563 and 0.7213 respectively. Motivated by the limitations of existing correlations, a new ap- proach using Polynomial Neural Networks (PNN) was developed. This model utilized reservoir temperature, gas gravity, gas oil ratio, and API as input parameters, trained on 70% of the dataset and tested on the remaining 30%. The PNN model exhibited superior predictive performance with a relative average absolute error of 2.8607 and a correlation coefficient of 0.9080. This study contributes a robust predictive tool for estimating βo in Sudanese oil fields, offering enhanced accuracy over traditional correlations and facilitating more reliable reservoir management decisions.
Suliman et al. (Tue,) studied this question.