A novel method for petroleum and natural gas resource potential evaluation and prediction by support vector machines (SVM)

Petroleum and natural gas resources (PNGR) are some of the major forms of fossil energy that are important for the development of industry and energy security. Along with the growing demand of petroleum consumption and the requirement for enhancing drilling success rate, reducing the exploration risk and saving exploration cost, prediction method for PNGR potential with high accuracy and wide practicability is needed. However, the existing PNGR evaluation and prediction methods based on traditional statistical principles are far from meeting the requirements of the present petroleum exploration and exploitation. Therefore, this study introduces a novel method for PNGR potential prediction by applying support vector machines (SVM) in the context of the rapid development of artificial intelligence and machine learning. This novel machine learning methodology first proposed a combination of support vector classification (SVC) for hydrocarbon accumulation probability prediction and then support vector regression (SVR) for reserve abundance prediction. The combining use of classification and regression model can fully utilize the professional knowledge of petroleum geology and the powerful data processing capabilities of machine learning algorithms and hence significantly improve the performance of the method. Furthermore, the dataset is set based on petroleum geology knowledge with the feature variables of source rock, sandstone reservoirs, sealing capacity and hydrocarbon migration, whose distribution are predictable and thus ensures the predictive effect in practical petroleum exploration. The results show that the testing accuracy of the hydrocarbon accumulation probability evaluation model by SVC ranges from 80% to 100% with an average of 88.92%. The performance of the SVR model for evaluating reserve abundance also performs well with the highest correlation coefficient of 0.767. In addition, several validation ways are applied for testing the reliability and stability of the model. For a hold-out test for a new zone, the model provides precise prediction of hydrocarbon accumulation probability and reserve abundance with an accuracy of 72.5% and a correlation coefficient of 0.744. The evaluation metric of the F1-score shows an average of 0.91 for the SVC models, the 4-fold cross-validation shows an average correlation coefficient of 0.663 for SVR model, which indicates the good performance of the SVC and SVR model. To conclude, this study not only provides an intelligent ML method system for PNGR potential precisely evaluation and prediction with the combination of SVC and SVR which is firstly used by application of ML in petroleum industry field, but is also significant for the application of ML in petroleum and natural gas exploration and exploitation.