Decision-Making Techniques for Water Shutoff Using Random Forests and Its Application in High Water Cut Reservoirs

The major oil fields are currently in the middle and late stages of waterflooding. The water channels between the wells are serious, and the injected water does little effect. The importance of profile control and water blocking has been identified. In this paper, the decision-making technique for water shutoff is investigated by the fuzzy evaluation method, FEM, which is improved using a random forest, RF, classification model. A machine learning random forest algorithm was developed to identify candidate wells and to predict the well performance for water shutoff operation. A data set consisting of 21 production wells with three-year production history is used, where out of the mentioned well data, 70% of them are implemented for training and the remaining are used for testing the model. After fitting the model, the new weights for the factors are established and decision-making is made. Accordingly, 16 wells out of 21 wells are selected by the FEM where 8 wells out of 21 wells are selected by the new factor weight created by RF for water shutoff. A numerical simulation model is established to plug the selected wells by both methods after which the influence of plugging on water cut, daily oil production, and cumulative oil production is compared. The paper shows that the reservoir had a better performance after eight wells were selected using a new weighting system created by RF instead of the 16 wells that were selected using the FEM model. The paper also states that the new weighting model’s accuracy improved the decision-making abilities of the wells.