Carbon capture and
sequestration is the process of capturing carbon
dioxide (CO
2
) from refineries, industrial facilities, and
major point sources such as power plants and storing the CO
2
in subsurface formations. Carbon capture and sequestration has the
potential to generate an industry comparable to, if not greater than,
the existing oil and gas sector. Subsurface formations such as unconventional
oil and gas reservoirs can store significant quantities of CO
2
. Despite their importance in the oil and gas industry, our
understanding of CO
2
sequestration in unconventional reservoirs
still needs to be developed. The objective of this paper was to use
an extensive data set of numerical simulation results combined with
data analytics and machine learning to identify the key parameters
that affect CO
2
sequestration in depleted shale reservoirs.
Machine learning-based predictive models based on multiple linear
regression, regression tree, bagging, random forest, and gradient
boosting were built to predict the cumulative CO
2
injected.
Variable importance was carried out to identify and rank important
reservoir and operational parameters. The results showed that random
forest provided the best predictive ability among the machine learning
techniques and that regression tree had the worst predictive ability,
mainly because of overfitting. The most significant variable for predicting
cumulative CO
2
sequestration was stimulated reservoir volume
fracture permeability. The workflows, machine learning models, and
results reported in this study provide insights for exploration and
production companies interested in quantifying CO
2
sequestration
performance in shale reservoirs.
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