A Physics-Constrained Data-Driven Workflow for Predicting Coalbed Methane Well Production Using A Combined Gated Recurrent Unit and Multi-Layer Perception Neural Network Model

Coalbed methane (CBM) has emerged as one of the clean unconventional resources to supplement the rising demand of conventional hydrocarbons. Analyzing and predicting CBM production performance is critical in choosing the optimal completion methods and parameters. However, the conventional numerical simulation has challenges of complicated gridding issues and expensive computational costs. The huge amount of available production data that has been collected in the field site opens up a new opportunity to develop data-driven approaches in predicting the production rate. Here, we proposed a novel physics-constrained data-driven workflow to effectively forecast the CBM productivity based on a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) combined neural network (GRU-MLP model). The model architecture is optimized by the multiobjective algorithm: nondominated sorting genetic algorithm Ⅱ (NSGA Ⅱ). The proposed framework was used to predict synthetic cases with various fracture-network-complexities and two multistage-fractured wells in field sites located at Qinshui basin and Ordos basin, China. The results indicated that the proposed GRU-MLP combined neural network was able to accurately and stably predict the production performance of multi-fractured horizontal CBM wells in a fast manner. Compared with Simple Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), the proposed GRU-MLP had the highest accuracy and stability especially for gas production in late-time. Consequently, a physics-constrained data-driven approach performed better than a pure data-driven method. Moreover, the optimum GRU-MLP model architecture was a group of optimized solutions, rather than a single solution. Engineers can evaluate the tradeoffs within this set according to the field-site requirements. This study provides a novel machine learning approach based on a GRU-MLP combined neural network model to estimate production performances in CBM wells. The method is simple and gridless, but is capable of predicting the productivity in a computational cost-effective way. The key findings of this work are expected to provide a theoretical guidance for the intelligent development in oil and gas industry.