Reliable steam production forecasting is vital for managing geothermal fields, yet conventional Arps
decline curve analysis assumes a fixed decline in time and cannot use the wellhead pressure that governs
steam deliverability. This study evaluates whether machine learning can forecast steam production more
accurately than the Arps approach for a single dry steam well, Well-1. From 438 weekly records (2004 to
2012) split chronologically into 306 training, 66 validation, and 66 testing, three Arps models were fitted
from the production peak to the pressure-normalized rate, while SVR, RF, and XGBoost were applied in a
residual-hybrid scheme using the static and flowing wellhead pressures, with the annual decline rate as the
primary, apple-to-apple comparison. The results agree: the best Arps model (exponential) gives an effective
decline of about 4.268%/year, close to the machine learning declines of 4.579%/year (XGBoost),
4.578%/year (RF), and 4.875%/year (SVR), and over the test zone the machine learning models reproduce
the measured rate closely (R2 of 0.983, 0.980, and 0.964), though these are hindcasts likely optimistic
because the weekly series was interpolated from digitized data. It is concluded that machine learning
complements rather than replaces conventional decline analysis; projected forward at about 4.579%/year,
the steam rate falls from about 29.19 kg/s in 2012 to about 7.39 kg/s in 2042. It is recommended that future
work test more wells, raw field data, and an independent wellhead-pressure forecast for genuine forward
prediction.
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