Physics Informed Neural Networks Based on a Capacitance Resistance Model for Reservoirs Under Water Flooding Conditions

In recent years great interest has risen towards surrogate reservoir models based on data-driven methodologies with the purpose of speeding up reservoir management decisions. In this work, a Physics Informed Neural Network (PINN) based on a Capacitance Resistance Model (CRM) has been developed and tested on a synthetic and on a real dataset to predict the production of oil reservoirs under waterflooding conditions. CRMs are simple models based on material balance that estimate the liquid production as a function of injected water and bottom hole pressure. PINNs are Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) that incorporate prior physical knowledge of the system under study to regularize the network. A PINN based on a CRM is obtained by including the residual of the CRM differential equations in the loss function designed to train the neural network on the historical data. During training, weights and biases of the network and parameters of the physical equations, such as connectivity factors between wells, are updated with the backpropagation algorithm. To investigate the effectiveness of the novel methodology on waterflooded scenarios, two test cases are presented: a small synthetic one and a real mature reservoir. Results obtained with PINN are compared with respect to CRM and ANN alone. In the synthetic case CRM and PINN give slightly better quality history matches and predictions than ANN. The connectivity factors estimated by CRM and PINN are very similar and correctly represent the underlying geology. In the real case PINN gives better quality history matches and predictions than ANN, and both significantly outperform CRM. Even though the CRM formulation is too simple to predict the complex behavior of a real reservoir, the CRM based regularization contributes to improving the PINN predictions quality compared to the purely data-driven ANN model. The connectivity factors estimated by CRM and PINN are not in agreement. However, the latter method provided results closer to our understanding of the flooding process after many years of operations and data analysis. All considered, PINN outperformed both CRM and ANN in terms of predictivity and interpretability, effectively combining strengths from both methodologies. The presented approach does not require the construction of a 3D model since it learns directly from production data, while preserving physical consistency. Moreover, it represents a computationally inexpensive alternative to traditional full-physics reservoir simulations which could have vast applications for problems requiring many forward evaluations, like the optimization of water allocation for mature reservoirs.