Fracture Pressure Prediction Using Surface Drilling Parameters by Artificial Intelligence Techniques

Several correlations are available to determine the fracture pressure, a vital property of a well, which is essential in the design of the drilling operations and preventing problems. Some of these correlations are based on the rock and formation characteristics, and others are based on log data. In this study, five artificial intelligence (AI) techniques predicting fracture pressure were developed and compared with the existing empirical correlations to select the optimal model. Real-time data of surface drilling parameters from one well were obtained using real-time drilling sensors. The five employed methods of AI are functional networks (FN), artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), radial basis function (RBF), and fuzzy logic (FL). More than 3990 datasets were used to build the five AI models by dividing the data into training and testing sets. A comparison between the results of the five AI techniques and the empirical fracture correlations, such as the Eaton model, Matthews and Kelly model, and Pennebaker model, was also performed. The results reveal that AI techniques outperform the three fracture pressure correlations based on their high accuracy, represented by the low average absolute percentage error (AAPE) and a high coefficient of determination (R²). Compared with empirical models, the AI techniques have the advantage of requiring less data, only surface drilling parameters, which can be conveniently obtained from any well. Additionally, a new fracture pressure correlation was developed based on ANN, which predicts the fracture pressure with high precision (R² = 0.99 and AAPE = 0.094%).