Petroleum Science and Technology, 26:19932008, 2008

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1091-6466 print/1532-2459 online
DOI: 10.1080/10916460701399493
Predicting Bubble-point Pressure and
Formation-volume Factor of Nigerian Crude Oil
System for Environmental Sustainability
E. O. Obanijesu
1
and D. O. Araromi
1
1
Chemical Engineering Department, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology,
Ogbomoso, Nigeria
Abstract: This paper presents a model for predicting the bubblepoint pressure (P
b
)
and oil formation-volume-factor at bubble-point (B
ob
) for crude samples collected
from some producing wells in the Niger-Delta region of Nigeria. The model was
developed using articial neural networks with 542 experimentally obtained Pressure-
Volume-Temperature (PVT) data sets. The model accurately predicts the P
b
and B
ob
as functions of the solution gas-oil ratio, the gas relative density, the oil specic
gravity, and the reservoir temperature. In order to obtain a generalized accurate model,
backpropagation with momentum for error minimization was used. The accuracy of
the developed model in this study was compared with some published correlations.
Apart from its accuracy, this model takes a shorter time to predict the PVT properties
when compared with empirical correlations. The immediate reason for this may have
to do with the non-linear nature of the empirical correlations.
Keywords: environmental sustainability, neural network, Niger-Delta, PVT
INTRODUCTION
The bubble point pressure (1
b
), which is an important Pressure-Volume-
Temperature (PVT) property, determines the oil-water ow ratio during hy-
drocarbon production. If too high, the quantity of produced water obtained at
the surface may be higher than that of oil, production will be reduced, and
well efciency will be low. The produced water, also known as brine (SPE,
2006), is the water associated with oil and gas reservoirs that is produced
along with the oil and gas. Produced water contains aromatic heterocycles
Address correspondence to E. O. Obanijesu, Chemical Engineering Department,
Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, Nigeria. E-mail: emmanuel
257@yahoo.com
1993
1994 E. O. Obanijesu and D. O. Araromi
and pyrogenics (CMI, 2002); trace (or heavy) metal such as cadmium (Cd),
chromium (Cr), lead (1
b
), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), and nickel (Ni) (Obanijesu
et al., 2004); and inorganic solutes like sulfur compounds; all of which could
be transported to air through evaporation. The volatile organic compounds
(VOCs), which are major components of the aromatic compounds, are pri-
mary contributors to the formation of photochemical oxidants (Mohammed
et al., 2002) and increase cancer risk in humans at certain levels of exposure
(Guo, 2004); hence, the need for its treatment before disposal. The disposal
of the concentrate at the end of treatment equally constitutes a pressing
technological problem. Dumping of the concentrate, which is the common
method of disposal in Nigeria, may result in the accumulation of heavy metals
in soils (Howari, 2004); and these toxic metals may pose an enormous threat
to soil, water, and air (Baba and Deniz, 2004). At certain concentrations,
exposure to heavy metals results to human death (Obanijesu et al., 2004).
The conventional way of obtaining the required PVT data is either
through experimental setup early in the production life of the reservoir or
by empirical correlation developed by some researchers. Oftentimes, exper-
imental data are very difcult and expensive to obtain while most of the
empirical correlations are complex in composition and highly non-linear.
Before the advent of ANN, various empirical correlations have been
in use for prediction (Gharbi and Elsharkawy, 2003; Petrosky and Farshad,
1993). They are essentially based on assumption that the bubble point pressure
normally increases with an increase in solution gas-oil ratio and reservoir tem-
perature and a decrease in oil API gravity and gas gravity. Other assumptions
include T
ob
increases with an increase in 1
s
, T , gas gravity, and oil gravity.
A major shortcoming with most of these correlations is that different crude
oil and gas systems used to develop them exhibit regional trends in chemical
and physical properties. They are either classied as parafnic, naphthenic,
or aromatic. This has made it impossible to use correlations developed from
samples of certain regions to give satisfactory prediction uid properties for
other regions.
Neural network-base modeling has been extensively used in process
engineering in the last decade (Gharbi and Elshakawy, 1997; Elsharkawy,
1998; Mujtaba and Hussain, 2001). ANN is a computer-based algorithm
which learns the behavior of a data population by self-turning its parameter in
such a way that the trained ANN matches the employed data accurately. For
a given set of input, ANN is able to produce a corresponding set of outputs
according to some mapping relationships that are encoded into some network
structure during a period of training (also called learning), and is dependent
upon the parameters of the network, that is, weight and biases.
Importantly, if the data used are sufciently descriptive, the ANN pro-
vides a rapid and condent prediction as soon as a new case, which has not
been seen by the model during the training phase. Also, ANN has the ability
to discover patterns in data, which are so obscure as to be imperceptible to
normal observation and standard statistical methods.
Nigerian Crude Oil System for Environmental Sustainability 1995
Most of the PVT properties predicted have a very low mean relative error
of 0.52.5% with no data set having a relative error in excess of 5%.
Osman et al. (2001) used 803 data sets from the Middle East, Malaysia,
Colombia, and the Gulf of Mexico to develop an ANN model with 402 of
these data sets used to train it, 201 sets to cross validate the relationship
established during the training process, and the remaining 200 sets used to
test the model for accuracy evaluation.
Garbi and Elsharkawy (2003) developed a neural network to predict 1
b
and T
ob
for crude oil samples collected from North and South America,
the North Sea, South East Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In all, 5,200
experimentally obtained PVT data sets were used to train the model while
an additional 234 PVT data sets were used to investigate its effectiveness.
The petroleum industry in Nigeria is more interested in hydrocarbon
production and avoidance of the resultant problems emanating from brine
production, there is dire need to develop a predictive model on Nigerian crude
based on its peculiarity when compared to other regional oil. This will assist
in solving some of the emerging communal problems faced by the operating
companies in the Niger-Delta area of the country due to environmental
degradation.
METHODOLOGY
This work develops a predictive model for Nigeria crude oil PVT properties
using articial neural network (ANN). This involves mapping of PVT data
of Nigeria crude oil systems using a generalized neutral network model; a
statistical tool was used to analyze and compare the accuracy of the neural
network model prediction with published PVT correlations data and using the
developed model to estimate the bubble point (1
b
) and oil formation volume
factor (T
ob
) for Nigeria crude oil system.
The values of bubble point pressure (1
b
) and oil formation volume factor
(T
ob
) were predicted. These two variables correspond to ANN output vector
(indicated by Y ). The inputs to ANN represent the amounts of information
that networks need to give output vector. The choice of inputs is made
using engineering judgment. Too much input would overload the network
and introduce unnecessary correlations among data, and can therefore disrupt
the network performance (Greaves et al., 2003). On the other hand, too few
inputs could lead to inaccurate predictions.
From the previous work done, it has been established that 1
b
and T
ob
are
strong functions of the solution gas-oil ratio 1
s
, the reservoir temperature T,
gas specic gravity Y
g
, and oil specic gravity Y
o
. These variables constituted
our input vectors for the networks. A Marquardt-Levenberg feed forward
backpropagation ANN topology is used due to its robustness and efcient
performance (Hussain and Ho, 2004). The network structure adopted for this
work is multilayer perceptron (MLP) consisting of an input layer with four
1996 E. O. Obanijesu and D. O. Araromi
neurons (T, 1
s
, Y
g
, and Y
o
) and several hidden layers with 50 neurons each
(Figure 1). Input to the perceptron are individually weighted and summed.
The perceptron computes the output as a function of J of the sum. The
activation function J is needed to introduce non-linearities into the network.
This makes the multilayer network a powerful representation of the non-
linearity system. The output from the perceptron is given as
,(k) D (n
T
(k)..(k)). (1)
The weights are dynamically updated using backpropagation algorithm. The
difference between the target output T and actual output (error e) is calculated
as
e(k) D T(k) ,(k). . . . (2)
The errors are backpropagated through the layer : and weight changes are
made. The formula for adjusting the weight is given by
n(k C1) D n(k) Cj.e(k). . . . (3)
Once the weights are adjusted, the feedforward process is repeated.
The training is intended to gradually update the connection weights to
minimize the mean square error 1 through
1 D
m

kD1
n

i D1
(T
.k/
i
,
.k/
i
)
2
. (4)
The weights are adjusted according to the gradient decent rule, so that the
actual output of the MLP moves closer to the desired output.
The training algorithm and the network architecture were implemented
using the MATLAB program. The algorithmis designed to approach a second
order training speed without computing the Hessian matrix. The performance
function having the form of a sum of squares was approximated as
H D J
T
J. (5)
Figure 1. Diagram of the perceptron model.
Nigerian Crude Oil System for Environmental Sustainability 1997
and the gradient was computed as
g D J
T
e. (6)
where J is the Jacobian matrix that contains rst derivatives of the network
errors with respect to the weights and biases, and e is a vector of network
errors.
The Jacobian matrix is then computed through a standard back-propaga-
tion technique and the generated Hessian matrix is then approximated using
quasi-Newton equation, thus,
.
kC1
D .
k
J
T
J Cj1|
1
J
T
e. (7)
During the training phase, the weights are adjusted according to the
generalized rule. To obtain the accurate models for predicting 1
b
and T
ob
as a
function of the other four variables, the number of neurons was systematically
varied to obtain a good t to the data. Training was completed when the
network was able to predict the given output.
Of the 542 data sets obtained from some wells in Niger-Delta of Nigeria,
264 sets were used to train the model, 142 sets used to cross validate the
relationship established during the training process, and the remaining 136
sets were used to test the model for accuracy evaluation. Each data range
contains the reservoir temperature T, solution gas-oil ratio 1
s
, gas specic
gravity ;
g
, oil API gravity ;
o
, bubble point pressure 1
b
, and oil formation
volume factor T
ob
(Table 1).
For comparison purposes, 1
b
and T
ob
for some existing empirical models
such as Standing, Glas, Labedi, and Elsharkawy were calculated through
their various equations.
For Standing model, 1
b
and T
ob
are respectively given as
1
b
D
__
1
s
;
g
_
anti log
10
(0.00091T 0.0142511) 1.4
_
. (8)
T
ob
D 0.972 C
1.47 10
4
1
s
(;
g
,;
o
)
0:5
C1.25T|
1:175
. (9)
Table 1. Range of PVT data used for training
Bubble point pressure (psia) 953,660
Bubble point oil formation volume factor (RB/STB) 1.03101.659
Solution gas oil ratio (SCF/STB) 221,234
Gas specic density (air D 1) 0.66901.1510
Stock tank oil gravity (

API) 16.350.8
Reservoir temperature 108220
1998 E. O. Obanijesu and D. O. Araromi
For Glas model
T
ob
D 1.0 C10
6:58511C2:91329log.Bb/0:27683.log.Bb//
2

(10)
T
b
D 1
s
_
;
g
;
o
_
0:526
C0.968T. (11)
while the T
ob
for Labedi and Elsharkawy were respectively calculated as
T
ob
D 0.9897 C0.0001364
_
1
s
_
;
g
;
o
_
0:5
C1.25T
_
1:175
. (12)
T
ob
D 1.0 C40.428 10
5
1
s
C63.802 10
5
(T 60)
C0.0780 10
5
_
1
s
(T 60)
_
;
g
;
o
__
. (13)
For comparative performance evaluation, average relative percent error,
average absolute percent error, minimum and maximum absolute percent
error, standard deviation and correlation coefcient were used as statistical
tools for comparison between the developed Neural Network (NN) model
and these existing empirical models.
The average percent relative error, which is the relative deviation of the
estimated values from the experimental data, was calculated as
1
r
D
1
n
N

i D1
1
i
. (14)
where
1
i
D
(,
i
O ,
i
)
,
i
100 i D 1. . . . . n. (15)
The average absolute percent relative error, which measures the relative
absolute deviation of the estimated values from the experimental values, was
calculated as
1
a
D
1
n
N

i D1
j1
i
j. (16)
The minimum and maximum absolute percent relative error, which dene the
ranges of error for each correlation, are respectively given by
1
min
D
n
min
i D1
j1
i
j (17)
1
max
D
n
max
i D1
j1
i
j. (18)
Nigerian Crude Oil System for Environmental Sustainability 1999
The Standard deviation, which is a measure of the spread or dispersion of
the data distribution, was calculated as
o D
_

n
i D1
(.
i
.)
n 1
. (19)
While the correlation coefcient that represents the degree of success in
reducing the standard deviation by regression analysis was calculated as
r D

_
1
n

i D1
(,
i
O ,
i
)
2
,
n

i D1
(,
i
,). (20)
where
, D
1
n
n

i D1
,
i
. (21)
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The training plots of the network, which show that the performance goal
is met, are displayed in Figures 2 and 3. The accuracy of the ANN de-
veloped in this study is evaluated against those developed by Standing,
Glas, Elsharkawy, and Labedi due to their global acceptability. The statistical
results of the comparison for both 1
b
and T
ob
are given in Tables 2 and
3. As shown in the tables, the proposed model shows high accuracy in
predicting both the 1
b
and T
ob
values, and achieves the lowest minimum
error, lowest maximum error, lowest standard deviation, and correlation co-
efcient. The model achieves 99.2% and 98.9% correlation coefcient for 1
b
and T
ob
, respectively, which are highest when compared with the existing
correlations (Figures 46; summarized as Figures 7 and 8). Absolute percent
error was used to test the accuracy of the models and the result compared
with those of other correlations. The ANN model has the lowest value of
4.36% for bubble point error (Figure 9) and lowest error of 1.73% for
oil formation volume factor (Figure 10). The scatter plots in Figures 11
15 depict the predicted T
ob
versus experimental T
ob
values. These cross
plots indicate the degree of agreement between the experimental and the
predicted values. If the agreement is perfect, then all points should lie on
the 45

line indicating the excellent agreement between the experimental

and the calculated data values. The best plot is obtained for ANN data as
shown in Figure 11 and the most scattered points are shown in Figure 13
representing Standing correlation, indicating their poor performance for the
set of data.
2000 E. O. Obanijesu and D. O. Araromi
Figure 2. ANN training plot for B
ob
.
Figure 3. ANN training plot for P
b
.
Nigerian Crude Oil System for Environmental Sustainability 2001
Table 2. Statistical parameters for the B
ob
correlations
ANN Standing Glas Elsharkawy Labedi
Average relative error (%) 0.67 25.28 18.35 1.26 15.57
Average absolute relative error (%) 1.73 25.28 18.35 4.65 15.66
Minimum absolute relative error (%) 0.29 5.72 1.45 1.89 0.39
Maximum absolute relative error (%) 5.90 41.41 34.06 12.30 31.24
Standard deviation (%) 2.49 12.12 10.84 6.36 10.55
Correlation coefcient 0.989 0.881 0.880 0.889
Table 3. Statistical parameters for the P
b
correlations
ANN Standing Glas
Average relative error (%) 2.68 12.59 23.08
Average absolute relative error (%) 4.36 24.71 23.17
Minimum absolute relative error (%) 0.68 0.91 0.36
Maximum absolute relative error (%) 15.18 80.00 86.56
Standard deviation (%) 6.14 15.64 27.46
Correlation coefcient 0.992 0.864 0.868
Figure 4. Cross plot of P
b
for ANN model.
2002 E. O. Obanijesu and D. O. Araromi
Figure 5. Cross plot of P
b
for Standing correlation.
Figure 6. Cross plot of P
b
for Glas correlation.
Nigerian Crude Oil System for Environmental Sustainability 2003
Figure 7. Comparison of P
b
correlation coefcient for different correlations.
Figure 8. Comparison of B
ob
correlation coefcient for different correlations.
Figure 9. Comparison of P
b
average absolute percent relative error (AAPRE) for
different correlations.
2004 E. O. Obanijesu and D. O. Araromi
Figure 10. Comparison of B
ob
average absolute percent relative error (AAPRE) for
different correlations.
Figure 11. Cross plot of B
ob
for articial neural network model.
Nigerian Crude Oil System for Environmental Sustainability 2005
Figure 12. Cross plot of B
ob
for Standing correlation.
Figure 13. Cross plot of B
ob
for Glas correlation.
2006 E. O. Obanijesu and D. O. Araromi
Figure 14. Cross plot of B
ob
for Elsharkawy correlation.
Figure 15. Cross plot of B
ob
for Labedi correlation.
Nigerian Crude Oil System for Environmental Sustainability 2007
CONCLUSION
The developed model provides better predictions and higher accuracy for
1
b
and T
ob
values, and achieves the lowest minimum error, lowest standard
deviation, and correlation coefcient when compared to empirical correlation
developed by the earlier researchers. Since it successfully predicts the bubble
point pressure and oil formation volume factor for data falling within the
range of data used in this study which were specically acquired from Niger-
Delta region of Nigeria, this model is recommended for prediction of the
reservoirs within the region.
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NOMENCLATURE
API oil API gravity
1
s
solution gas oil ratio
1
b
bubble point pressure (psia)
1
s
separator pressure
T reservoir temperature (

F)
T
r
reservoir temperature (

R)
T
s
separator temperature (

F)
T
k
reservoir temperature (

K)
;
o
oil specic gravity (air D 1.0)
;
g
gas specic gravity (air D 1.0)
;
gs
separator gas specic gravity (air D 1.0)
T
ob
bubble point oil formation volume factor (RB/STB)
T
.k/
i
the target value of the output neuron for the given kth data pattern
,
.k/
i
the prediction for the i th output neuron given the kth data pattern
M number of training data pattern
N number of neurons in the output layer