Accurate estimation of interfacial tension (IFT) between nitrogen and crude oil during nitrogen-based gas injection into oil reservoirs is imperative. The previous research works dealing with prediction of IFT of oil and nitrogen systems consider synthetic oil samples such n-alkanes. In this work, we aim to utilize eight machine learning methods of Decision Tree (DT), AdaBoost (AB), Random Forest (RF), K-nearest Neighbors (KNN), Ensemble Learning (EL), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Multilayer Perceptron Artificial Neural Network (MLP-ANN) to construct data-driven intelligent models to predict crude oil - nitrogen IFT based upon experimental data of real crude oils samples encountered in underground oil reservoirs. Several statistical indices and graphical approaches are used as accuracy performance indicators. The results show that virtually all the gathered datapoints are suitable for the purpose of model development. The sensitivity analysis indicated that pressure, temperature and crude oil API all negatively affect the IFT, with pressure being the most effective factor. The evaluation study proved that Random Forest is the most accurate developed intelligent model as it was characterized with acceptable R-squared (0.959), mean square error (1.65), average absolute relative error (6.85%) of unseen test datapoints as well as with correct trend prediction of IFT with regard to all input parameters of pressure, temperature and crude oil API. The developed model can be considered an accurate an easy-to-use tool for the prediction of crude oil/N2 IFT values for enhance oil recovery study optimization and upstream reservoir investigations.
Keywords: Crude oil – Nitrogen IFT; Machine learning; Outlier detection; Sensitivity analysis.
© 2025. The Author(s).