Prediction of Coalbed Methane Production Using a Modified Machine Learning Methodology

Compared to natural and shale gas, studies on predicting production specific to coalbed methane (CBM) are still relatively limited, and mainly use decline curve methods such as Arps, Stretched Exponential Decline Model, and Duong’s model. In recent years, machine learning (ML) methods applied to CBM production prediction have focused on the significant data characteristics of production, achieving more accurate predictions. However, throughout the application process, these models require a large amount of data for training and can only achieve accurate forecasts over a short period, such as 30 days. This study constructs a hybrid ML model by integrating a long short-term memory (LSTM) network and Transformer architecture. The model is trained using the mean absolute error ( MAE ) loss function, optimized using the Adam optimizer, and finally evaluated using metrics such as MAE , root mean square error ( RMSE ), and R squared ( R 2 ) scores. The results show that the LSTM-Attention (LSTM-A) hybrid model based on small training datasets can accurately capture the CBM production trend and is superior to traditional methods and the LSTM model regarding prediction accuracy and effective prediction time interval. The methodologies established and the results obtained in this study are of great significance to accurately predict CBM production. It is also helpful to better understand the mechanisms of CBM production.