Acid Gas Re-Injection System Design Using Machine Learning

An “energy evolution” is necessary to manifest an environmentally sustainable world while meeting global energy requirements, with natural gas being the most suitable transition fuel. Covering the ever-increasing demand requires exploiting lower value sour gas accumulations, which involves an acid gas treatment issue due to the greenhouse gas nature and toxicity of its constituents. Successful design of the process requires avoiding the formation of acid gas vapor which, in turn, requires time-consuming and complex phase behavior calculations to be repeated over the whole operating range. In this work, we propose classification models from the Machine Learning field, able to rapidly identify the problematic vapor/liquid encounters, as a tool to accelerate phase behavior calculations. To set up this model, a big number of acid gas instances are generated by perturbing pressure, temperature, and acid gas composition and offline solving the stability problem. The generated data are introduced to various classification models, selected based on their ability to provide rapid answers when trained. Results show that by integrating the resulting trained model into the gas reinjection process simulator, the simulation process is substantially accelerated, indicating that the proposed methodology can be readily utilized in all kinds of acid gas flow simulations.