Predicting Phase Equilibria of CO₂ Hydrate in Complex Systems Containing Salts and Organic Inhibitors for CO₂ Storage: A Machine Learning Approach

In this study, 13 machine learning (ML) models were employed to predict the phase equilibrium temperatures of the CO₂ hydrate in systems with salts and organic inhibitors: Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Support Vector Regression (SVR), k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Extra Trees (ET), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), Categorical Boosting (CatBoost), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM), Histogram-Based Gradient Boosting (HistGB), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). A dataset consisting of 1801 experimentally measured equilibrium data points was gathered, which included both pure water systems and systems with thermodynamic inhibitors. After data preprocessing, 1402 data points were selected for ML training and validation. Boosting algorithms generally yielded high predictive accuracy, with the MLP demonstrating notably superior accuracy. The predicted equilibrium temperatures for complex systems containing both salts and organic inhibitors were also compared with those calculated by the widely used CSMGem software. With the exception of SVR, KNN, and DT, all models outperformed CSMGem, in terms of statistical assessment. Specifically, the CatBoost model accurately predicted equilibrium temperatures for most test sets of combinations of salts and organic inhibitors. This study underscores the viability of ML models for predicting the phase equilibria of the CO₂ hydrate in the presence of single and mixed thermodynamic inhibitors.