Scientific Contributions Oil and Gas
Vol 48 No 4 (2025)

Application of PCA and Machine Learning for Predicting Oil Measurement Discrepancies in Custody Transfer Systems: Understanding from an Indonesian Mature Onshore Facility

Wan Fadly (Universitas Islam Riau)
Fiki Hidayat (Universitas Islam Riau)
Noratikah Abu (Universiti Malaysia Pahang)
Muhammad Khairul Afdhol (Universitas Islam Riau)
Dike Putra (Universitas Islam Riau)
Mulyandri (PT. Pertamina Hulu Rokan)



Article Info

Publish Date
16 Dec 2025

Abstract

Oil measured volume discrepancies in custody transfer systems is becoming a persistent challenge, which is often caused by complex thermal, hydraulic, and compositional interactions. Therefore, this study aimed to introduce a data-driven framework incorporating Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and machine learning (ML) to identify as well as predict discrepancies at a representative onshore gathering station (GS) in Indonesia (Field-X). Major operational parameters, including gross volume, unallocated net oil, pressure, temperature, and Basic Sediment & Water (BS&W), were analyzed to assess the impact on volumetric imbalance. During the analysis, PCA reduced 64 correlated variables to five principal components, explaining 95% of the total variance and showing gross volume, pressure, and temperature as dominant factors. Four ML models, namely XGBoost, Random Forest, Support Vector Regression, and ElasticNet, were trained as well as validated with three-fold time series cross-validation for temporal robustness. Incorporating PCA significantly improved predictive performance, with Support Vector Regression showing the largest R² increase (from –0.0082 to 0.82). Results signified that discrepancies were primarily governed by thermodynamic shrinkage, temperature changes, and BS&W-related metering errors. In addition, the proposed PCA–ML framework offered an interpretable, reliable method for early detection and mitigation of oil volume discrepancies in complex production environments.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

SCOG

Publisher

Subject

Chemical Engineering, Chemistry & Bioengineering Energy

Description

The Scientific Contributions for Oil and Gas is the official journal of the Testing Center for Oil and Gas LEMIGAS for the dissemination of information on research activities, technology engineering development and laboratory testing in the oil and gas field. Manuscripts in English are accepted from ...