Restoration of missing pressures in a gas well using recurrent neural networks with long short-term memory cells

Abstract

This study proposes a data-driven method based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with long short-term memory (LSTM) cells for restoring missing pressure data from a gas production well. Pressure data recorded by gauges installed at the bottom hole and wellhead of a production well often contain abnormal or missing values as a result of gauge malfunctions, noise, outliers, and operational instability. RNNs employing LSTM cells to prevent long-term memory loss have been widely used to predict time series data. In this study, an RNN with the LSTM method was used to restore abnormal or missing wellhead and bottom-hole pressures in three intervals within a production sequence of more than eight years in duration. The pressure restoration was performed using various input features for RNNs with LSTM models based on the characteristics of the available data. It was carried out through three sequential processes and the results were acceptable with a mean absolute percentage error no more than 5.18%. The reliability of the proposed method was verified through a comparison with the results of a physical model.