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The Application of Artificial Neural Networks for the Prediction of

Oil Production Flow Rate

Article  in  Energy Sources Part A Recovery Utilization and Environmental Effects · July 2012
DOI: 10.1080/15567036.2010.492386

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The Application of Artificial Neural

Networks for the Prediction of Oil
Production Flow Rate
a b
A. Mirzaei-Paiaman & S. Salavati
a
Department of Petroleum Engineering, National Iranian South Oil
Company, Ahvaz, Iran
b
Department of Computer Engineering, Shahid Chamran University,
Ahvaz, Iran

Version of record first published: 03 Aug 2012

To cite this article: A. Mirzaei-Paiaman & S. Salavati (2012): The Application of Artificial Neural
Networks for the Prediction of Oil Production Flow Rate, Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization,
and Environmental Effects, 34:19, 1834-1843

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 Energy Sources, Part A, 34:1834–1843, 2012
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1556-7036 print/1556-7230 online
DOI: 10.1080/15567036.2010.492386

The Application of Artificial Neural Networks for

the Prediction of Oil Production Flow Rate

A. MIRZAEI-PAIAMAN1 and S. SALAVATI2

1
Department of Petroleum Engineering, National Iranian South Oil Company,
Ahvaz, Iran
2
Department of Computer Engineering, Shahid Chamran University, Ahvaz,
Iran
Downloaded by [A. Mirzaei-Paiaman] at 07:56 03 August 2012

Abstract Estimation of oil production flow rate, where direct rate measurement is
not feasible, is a challenge faced by petroleum engineers in some fields throughout
the world. In such situations, oil flow rate is commonly estimated using empirical
correlations. In some cases, significant error is inherent in application of the empirical
correlations and yields inaccurate results. This study presents a new methodology
for prediction of oil flow rate in two-phase flow of oil and gas through wellhead
chokes using the artificial neural network technique. The developed model predicts
oil flow rate as functions of choke upstream pressure, choke size, and producing gas
to oil ratio. The accuracy of the developed model was compared with some popular
empirical correlations. Results of comparison showed that oil flow rates predicted by
the new model are in excellent agreement with actual measured data.

Keywords artificial neural network, empirical correlation, oil flow rate, two-phase
flow, wellhead choke

1. Introduction
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are mathematical or computational models that try to
simulate the structure and/or functional aspects of biological neural networks. They can
be used to model complex relationships between inputs and outputs or to find patterns in
data. Fundamentals of ANNs have been fully discussed in the literature (e.g., Anderson
and Rosenfeld, 1989). ANN research dates back to a research by McCulloch and Pitts
(1943). Since then, ANNs have been widely used to model some of the human activities
in many areas of science and engineering, such as aerospace, automotive, electronics,
manufacturing, petroleum engineering, etc. (Hagan et al., 1997).
Petroleum engineers have shown a high degree of open-mindedness in utilizing
new technologies from different disciplines to solve old and new petroleum engineering
problems. The key in using ANN in petroleum engineering is to observe, recognize,
and define problems in a way that will be addressable by neural nets (Mohaghegh and
Ameri, 1995). It seems that the first application of ANNs in petroleum engineering
emerged in 1993 by Juniardi and Ershaghi. In the last two decades, ANN has been

Address correspondence to Abouzar Mirzaei-Paiaman, National Iranian South Oil Company,

Department of Petroleum Engineering, Ahvaz, Iran. E-mail: mirzaei1986@gmail.com

1834
 ANN and Flow Rate Prediction 1835

adapted in various aspects of petroleum engineering, like reservoir characterization, field

development, two-phase flow in pipes, identification of well test interpretation models,
completion analysis, formation damage prediction, permeability prediction, and fractured
reservoirs (Ramgulam, 2007).
Wellhead chokes are frequently used to control flow rates to desired levels for several
functions. In actual field conditions, a flow through choke is in two-phase, oil and gas.
This kind of flow is in one of the sonic or sub-sonic flow conditions. Sonic flow condition
is defined as a condition in which the ratio of downstream pressure to upstream pressure
is nearly 0.55. In this flow condition, flow rate is no longer dependent on downstream
disturbance of pressure, temperature, or density (Brill and Beggs, 1991).
For sonic conditions, there are a number of correlations to study simultaneous oil and
gas flow behavior through chokes. These correlations have been developed theoretically
or empirically using experimental or field production test data. There are two main
challenges with most of the correlations. Theoretical ones have too many parameters,
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which makes them difficult to apply, because in the petroleum industry gathering too
many parameters for inclusion in theoretical correlations is costly and time consuming.
Also, empirical correlations are limited in range of data used in their development
stage. This means that empirical correlations may yield acceptable results only in similar
circumstances where the range of data is like the range of data used in the development
stage of correlations. Therefore, these correlations lack the generalization capability.
Generally, using this type of correlation is preferred to theoretical-type correlations.
The most popular correlations are those proposed by Gilbert (1954), Baxendell (1957),
Ros (1960), and Achong (1961). Also, the newest empirical correlation is proposed by
Mirzaei-Paiaman (in press).
Application of published empirical correlations by production engineers may usually
be a misleading tool, since due to significant errors of the majority of these correlations,
accurate estimation of oil flow rate is not easily reached. Therefore, estimation of oil
flow rate where direct rate measurement is not feasible is a challenge faced by petroleum
engineers in some fields throughout the world. In this study, to overcome the mentioned
problem, a new methodology is presented to predict oil flow rate in two-phase flow of oil
and gas through wellhead chokes using ANN technique. To do this, accurately measured
field production test data from 62 wells in 15 producing fields in the South West of Iran,
Northern Persian Gulf, were used. The majority of the fields are of the biggest Persian
fields.

2. Methodology
A multilayer perceptron neural network, as the most widely used neural networks (Bhatt,
2002), was employed and back propagation algorithm (Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986),
as one type of feed-forward and supervised ANN, was selected as a learning rule.
From the previous works done (e.g., Al-Towalib and Al-Marhoun 1994), it has been
established that oil flow rate is a function of several factors. In general, these factors are
the choke upstream pressure, choke size, producing gas to oil ratio, and gas and oil specific
gravities. Mirzaei-Paiaman (in press) showed that the oil flow rate is fairly insensitive to
gas and oil specific gravities and documented that only the other three remaining factors
are dominant factors controlling oil flow rate. Therefore, in this research, choke upstream
pressure, choke size, and producing gas to oil ratio are set as the input parameters for the
ANN model and oil flow rate is set as the output parameter. The effect of choke upstream
pressure, choke size, and producing gas to oil ratio on oil flow rate is shown in Figures
 1836 A. Mirzaei-Paiaman and S. Salavati
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Figure 1. Effect of choke upstream pressure on oil flow rate.

1, 2, and 3, respectively. These figures show no clear meaningful relation between each
individual parameter and oil flow rate. The figures also show a scattering of data and
provide a good sense regarding the range of them.
Besides the inputs and output, the designed network consists of one hidden layer.
Generally, for most applications, one hidden layer is sufficient if enough hidden neurons
are used (Kim and Park, 1999). More than one hidden layer greatly increases the
amount of time required for training and testing without noticeable improvement in

Figure 2. Effect of choke size on oil flow rate.

 ANN and Flow Rate Prediction 1837
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Figure 3. Effect of producing gas to oil ratio on oil flow rate.

performance. The number of neurons in the hidden layer was determined by a trial and
error process. Applying this process, it was found that four neurons is the optimum
number and causes the best convergence between the produced results and the training
data. Therefore, to summarize, the network consists of three layers, which are one
input layer (bearing three neurons), one hidden layer (bearing four neurons), and one
output layer (bearing one neuron), as depicted in Figure 4. In addition, transfer functions
for the hidden layer and output layer were set as tan-sigmoid and linear, respectively.
Finally, the designed network was trained using 134 sets of data. Range of used data
for the training stage is shown in Table 1. Figure 5 shows different steps of the ANN
methodology.

Figure 4. Neural network architecture used in this study.

 1838 A. Mirzaei-Paiaman and S. Salavati

Table 1
Range of data used for training and testing stages

Range of data Range of data

used for used for
Type of data training stage testing stage

Oil flow rate, STB/day 198–9,643 282–8,464

Choke upstream pressure, psia 115–4,308 198–3,974
Choke size, 64th of an inch 16–128 16–128
Producing gas to oil ratio, SCF/STB 158–6,100 192–5,511
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Figure 5. Different steps of our ANN methodology.

 ANN and Flow Rate Prediction 1839

Table 2
Statistical parameters for the oil flow rate correlations

Mirzaei-
ANN Gilbert Ros Baxendell Achong Paiaman

Average relative error, % 0.33 1.85 15.39 22.44 32.89 1.13

Average absolute relative 2.11 17.19 21.06 26.62 36.48 9.31
error, %
Minimum absolute relative 0.54 1.07 0.88 1.79 2.87 0.76
error, %
Maximum absolute relative 6.38 39.99 50.46 68.15 103.33 46.24
error, %
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3. Results and Discussion

Twenty data sets with a range of data shown in Table 1, were used to test the performance
of the network. These sets of data were not used by the network during the training
stage. The accuracy of the ANN was evaluated against correlations proposed by Gilbert,
Ros, Baxendell, Achong, and Mirzaei-Paiaman. Statistical error analysis was performed
and average, minimum, and maximum absolute relative errors were determined for each
correlation. Average relative error and correlation coefficient were also determined. The
statistical results of the comparison for oil flow rate are shown in Table 2. As shown in
the table, the ANN model shows high accuracy in predicting oil flow rate and achieves the
lowest average relative error ( 0.33%), lowest average absolute relative error (2.11%),
lowest minimum absolute relative error (0.54%), and lowest maximum absolute relative
error (6.38%). The ANN model also achieves the highest correlation coefficient (1.00)
when compared with the existing correlations as shown in Figure 6. The plots in Figures
7–12 show the cross plots of predicted oil flow rate versus actual oil flow rates for each
correlation. The cross plots indicate the degree of agreement between the actual and the

Figure 6. Comparison of oil flow rate correlation coefficient for different correlations.
 1840 A. Mirzaei-Paiaman and S. Salavati
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Figure 7. Cross plot of oil flow rate for ANN model.

Figure 8. Cross plot of oil flow rate for Gilbert correlation.

predicted values. If the agreement is perfect, then all points should lie on the unit slope
line (e.g., best fit line), indicating the excellent agreement between the actual and the
predicted values. The best plot is obtained for ANN data as shown in Figure 7.

4. Conclusion
The developed ANN model presented in this study gives better predictions and higher
accuracy for oil flow rate values. The presented model achieves the lowest average
 ANN and Flow Rate Prediction 1841
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Figure 9. Cross plot of oil flow rate for Ros correlation.

Figure 10. Cross plot of oil flow rate for Baxendell correlation.

absolute relative error, lowest minimum absolute relative error, lowest maximum absolute
relative error, and lowest average relative error. As well, the ANN model gives the most
favorable value for coefficient when compared to empirical correlations. Apart from its
accuracy, this model takes a shorter time to predict the oil flow rate when compared
with some empirical correlations that are including more than three input parameters.
The immediate reason for this may be due to fewer numbers of input parameters in the
ANN model (e.g., choke upstream pressure, choke size, and producing gas to oil ratio).
 1842 A. Mirzaei-Paiaman and S. Salavati
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Figure 11. Cross plot of oil flow rate for Achong correlation.

Figure 12. Cross plot of oil flow rate for Mirzaei-Paiaman correlation.

Acknowledgment
The authors wish to thank the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and its subsidiary
company, National Iranian South Oil Company (NISOC), for their support during this
study.

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 ANN and Flow Rate Prediction 1843

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SI Metric Conversion Factors

bbl  1.589 873 E-01 D m3
ft3  2.831 685 E-02 D m3
in.*  2.54 E-02 D m
psi  6.894 757 EC03 D Pa
*Conversion factor is exact

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