Data Mining Algorithms for Operating Pressure Forecasting of Crude Oil Distribution Pipelines to Identify Potential Blockages

Abstract

The implementation of data mining has become very popular in many fields recently, including in the petroleum industry. It is widely used to help in decision-making processes in order to minimize oil losses during operations. One of the major causes of loss is oil flow blockages during transport to the gathering facility, known as the congeal phenomenon. To overcome this situation, real-time surveillance is used to monitor the oil flow condition inside pipes. However, this system is not able to forecast the pipeline pressure on the next several days. The objective of this study is to forecast the pressure several days in advance using real-time pressure data, as well as external factor data recorded by nearby weather stations, such as ambient temperature and precipitation. Three machine learning algorithms—multi-layer perceptron (MLP), long short-term memory (LSTM), and nonlinear autoregressive exogenous model (NARX)—are evaluated and compared with each other using standard regression evaluation metrics, including a steady-state model. As a result, with proper hyperparameters, in the proposed method of NARX with MLP as a regressor, the NARX algorithm showed the best performance among the evaluated algorithms, indicated by the highest values of R2 and lowest values of RMSE. This algorithm is capable of forecasting the pressure with high correlation to actual field data. By forecasting the pressure several days ahead, system owners may take pre-emptive actions to prevent congealing.