Production Forecasting Based on Attribute-Augmented Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network for a Typical Carbonate Reservoir in the Middle East

Production forecasting plays an important role in development plans during the entire period of petroleum exploration and development. Artificial intelligence has been extensively investigated in recent years because of its capacity to extensively analyze and interpret complex data. With the emergence of spatiotemporal models that can integrate graph convolutional networks (GCN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN), it is now possible to achieve multi-well production prediction by considering the impact of interactions between producers and historical production data simultaneously. Moreover, an accurate prediction not only depends on historical production data but also on the influence of neighboring injectors’ historical gas injection rate (GIR). Therefore, based on the assumption that introducing GIR can enhance prediction accuracy, this paper proposes a deep learning-based hybrid production forecasting model that is aimed at considering both the spatiotemporal characteristics of producers and the GIR of neighboring injectors. Specifically, we integrated spatiotemporal characteristics and GIR into an attribute-augmented spatiotemporal graph convolutional network (AST-GCN) and gated recurrent units (GRU) neural network to extract intricate temporal correlations from historical data. The method proposed in this paper has been successfully applied in a well pattern (including five producers and seven gas injectors) in a low-permeability carbonate reservoir in the Middle East. In single well production forecasting, the error of AST-GCN is 63.2%, 37.3%, and 16.1% lower in MedAE, MAE, and RMSE compared with GRU and 62.9%, 44.6%, and 28.9% lower compared with RNS. Similarly, the accuracy of AST-GCN is 15.9% and 35.8% higher than GRU and RNS in single well prediction. In well-pattern production forecasting, the error of AST-GCN is 41.2%, 64.2%, and 75.2% lower in RMSE, MAE, and MedAE compared with RNS, while the accuracy of AST-GCN is 29.3% higher. After different degrees of Gaussian noise are added to the actual data, the average change in AST-GCN is 3.3%, 0.4%, and 1.2% in MedAE, MAE, and RMSE, which indicates the robustness of the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model can consider the production data, gas injection data, and spatial correlation at the same time, which performs well in oil production forecasts.