Application of Machine

Learning in Oil and Gas

Industry
Priyanka Raghavan
About me

 Team Lead at Schlumberger working on Prestack Seismic Interpretation product

 Did Coursera Machine Learning Course
 Little experience on Machine Learning before this challenge
 Participated in SEG “machine learning challenge” with another team member (Steve
Hall)
Agenda

 Background oil & gas Industry

 Problem statement
 Exploring Data
 Algorithms we tried
 What worked?
 What did the top team do?
 Future Work and Lessons Learnt
Background- Oil & Gas (Big Data)

 Big data in Oil and Gas Industry

 Well logging was discovered by Marcel and Conrad Schlumberger in 1927
 Nearly 100 years of oil field data
 Typical data size- Normal to see peta-byte data
 Many tools and techniques in Geoscientist toolbox for identifying Lithofacies
 Aim to find reservoir rock or target areas for hydrocarbon extraction
 What is Well logging?
 What is Lithofacies and classification?
 Bring Machine Learning to Geoscientist
toolbox
 Society of Exploration Geophysict(SEG)
conducted a challenge
 Identify a Lithofacies based on well log
measurement
 Team came 5th in competition
 Used open source tools like python, jupyter
notebook, scikit-learn library and Git for version
control
 Exposed to various algorithms through the
challenge
 Dataset
 Dataset is in Kansas region
 3232 training data points
 Well log measurements
 Gamma Ray intensity-> Measures radioactivity of surrounding rocks
 Resistivity- >Saturation of oil,gas,water
 PhotoElectric-> Measures photo electric absorption
 Neutron-density porosity difference-> Porosity indicator
 Average neutron-density porosity -> Porosity indicator
 Nonmarine/marine indicator
 Relative position
 Facies data available from 9 wells
 Goal was to classify blind data with only measurements
Algorithms tried for facies classification

 SVM
 Logistical Regression
 K nearest neighbours
 Random forest
 Majority Voting
 Gradient boosting
 One vs One Multiclass GBM- Winning solution and final one
What did we do that worked?

 Feature engineering
 One vs One multiclass using Random Forest
 No abrupt boundaries between facies
 Intelligent replacement of PE values, which had nulls
 Kaggle type approach helped as we learnt from other teams
What the Winning Team did & Lessons
Learnt
 Better Feature extraction
 Finding new features
 Model Tuning
 Using XGradientBoost
 Some key takeaways from our experience (to be elaborated)
 Machine Learning is a good strategy for facies prediction
Future work

 Get some more geological information by collaborating with experts

 Improving classifier by training on other datasets
 Concentrate on weighting by being more intelligent
 Rank results from algorithm and Geoscientist, like a Turing test?