Prediction of non-hydrocarbon gas components in separator by using Hybrid Computational Intelligence models

Accurate prediction of non-hydrocarbon (Non-HC) gas components in the gas-oil separators reduces the cost of gas and oil production in petroleum engineering. However, this task is difficult because there is no known relation among the properties of crude oil and the separators. There are studies that attempt to predict hydrocarbons (HCs) components using either Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques or conventional techniques like Equitation-of-State (EOS) and Empirical Correlation (EC). In this paper, we explore the applicability of CI techniques such as Artificial Neural Network, Support Vector Regressions, and Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System to predict the Non-HC gas components in gas-oil separator tank. Further, we incorporate Genetic Algorithms (GA) into the Hybrid Computational Intelligence (HCI) models to enhance the accuracy of prediction. GA is used to determine the most favorable values of the tuning parameters in the CI models. The performances of the CI and HCI models are compared with the performance of the conventional techniques like EOS and EC. The experimental results show that accuracy of prediction by CI and HCI models outperform the conventional methods for N-2 and H2S gas components. Furthermore, the HCI models perform better than the non-optimized CI models while predicting the Non-HC gas components.