Using unsupervised machine learning to identify risk of failure at ageing oil and gas assets

Abstract

Asset integrity management of ageing oil and gas assets is an ongoing challenge. This paper uses unsupervised algorithms (i.e. clustering technique) to identify carbon steel piping with increased probability of failure due to various internal corrosion mechanisms. The application used over 20 variables including wellhead planktonic bacterial counts, Fe2+ levels, oil and water production rates, historical Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) records, remaining life of downstream equipment, previous remediation data and geographical location data. An unsupervised machine learning clustering algorithm was written grounded in mathematical techniques of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and k-means clustering. The probabilistic algorithm identified implicit patterns, which were then used to identify critical and non-critical piping clusters. Outputs from the clustering model were used to prioritise field measurements, and while these are ongoing there appears to be a good agreement with model predictions. The paper further discusses the measures that have a higher impact on the classification accuracy of the algorithm.