Oil Formation Volume Factor Prediction Using Artificial Neural Network: A Case Study of Niger Delta Crudes

Artificial intelligence techniques provide an alternative to conventional empirical correlation methods when experimentally determined oil formation volume factors (OFVF) are lacking.  A new mathematical model is proposed using an artificial neural network (ANN) for estimating the OFVF for the Niger Delta crude oils. The method consists of two stages: data decorrelation through principal component analysis (PCA) and OFVF estimation through ANN. Data decorrelation was used to reduce redundancy in the data which decreased the number of neurons in the hidden layer needed for an ANN to achieve high accuracy. In the development of the model, 316 data points were obtained from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.  Application of data cleaning, outliers’ elimination and PCA analysis reduced the data to 243 points. 213 data points were used to develop the model of which 75% was used for training, 15% for validation and 10% for testing. The remaining 30 data points were used to test the predictive capability of the proposed model. The results obtained were compared with widely accepted empirical correlations of Standing, Glaso, Vazquez, Ikiensikimama & Ajienka, and Al-Marhoun. The proposed new model performed better than all of them in terms of coefficient of correlation, AAPE and RMSE. Hence the ANN model will reduce cost, save time, and also predict the OFVF of Niger Delta crudes with higher precision.