Estimating the Total Organic Carbon for Unconventional Shale Resources During the Drilling Process: A Machine Learning Approach

Total organic carbon (TOC) is an essential parameter that indicates the quality of unconventional reservoirs. In this study, four machine learning (ML) algorithms of the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), support vector regression (SVR), functional neural networks (FNN), and random forests (RFs) were optimized to evaluate the TOC. The novelty of this work is that the optimized models predict the TOC from the bulk gamma-ray (GR) and spectral GR logs of uranium, thorium, and potassium only. The ML algorithms were trained on 749 datasets from Well-1, tested on 226 datasets from Well-2, and validated on 73 data points from Well-3. The predictability of the optimized algorithms was also compared with the available equations. The results of this study indicated that the optimized ANFIS, SVR, and RF models overperformed the available empirical equations in predicting the TOC. For validation data of Well-3, the optimized ANFIS, SVR, and RF algorithms predicted the TOC with AAPEs of 10.6%, 12.0%, and 8.9%, respectively, compared with the AAPE of 21.1% when the FNN model was used. While for the same data, the TOC was assessed with AAPEs of 48.6%, 24.6%, 20.2%, and 17.8% when Schmoker model, ΔlogR method, Zhao et al. correlation, and Mahmoud et al. correlation was used, respectively. The optimized models could be applied to estimate the TOC during the drilling process if the drillstring is provided with GR and spectral GR logging tools.