Abstract
Background: Absolute permeability plays an important role in studying the fluids flow in porous media during the development of oil and gas reservoirs, the injection of CO2 into reservoirs for storage, the monitoring of pollutants migration in underground aquifers, and the modeling of catalytic systems. Therefore, an accurate and fast evaluation of its values is an important task. Aim: The purpose of this article is to study the applicability of machine learning methods for predicting the absolute permeability of carbonate samples, as well as ways to improve the prediction of permeability. Materials and methods: The input data is 408 small volumes extracted from four cylindrical carbonate samples composed almost entirely of calcite. Input data includes total and connected porosity, specific surface area, radii of all and only connected pores, coordination number, throat radius and length, tortuosity, and absolute permeability. Permeability prediction is carried out using regression machine learning methods such as random forest, extremely random trees and extended gradient boosting. Parameters (data) of small volumes were determined using pore-scale modeling of water flow in their pore space applying a specialized Avizo software. Results: Data of small volumes extracted from fractured and non-fractured samples were analyzed, and the results showed that there are good relationships between many parameters of small volumes. For example, the connected and total porosity have a second-order polynomial relationship with a high correlation coefficient. Using the above-mentioned regression machine learning methods, absolute permeability values were predicted when input data divided into training and testing data in a ratio of 80/20 and 70/30. Conclusion: Using the logarithm of permeability instead of permeability itself and considering fractured and non-fractured samples separately, can increase the accuracy of absolute permeability prediction using the above-mentioned machine learning methods up to 90%. The extremely random trees method is the most accurate among the three machine learning methods considered for our task.