Heavy Oil is an increasingly important resource for securing future energy supply as conventional resources are depleted. The recovery of this resource is associated with high fixed capital investments. The underlying economics for developing heavy oil are heavily dependent on market demand and price of oil & gas1 . On the upside, the geologic risk associated with the recovery of this resource is minimal and the in-place quantity is three times the combined world reserve of conventional oil and gas2 .

Field development decisions must be made despite uncertainties of oil and gas price, well performance, facilities costs, and downstream demand. Several conventional thermal methods exist to recover heavy oil such of steam floods, cyclic steam stimulation and SAGD.

Cyclic Steam Stimulation represents a widely used thermal recovery process that can be optimized to achieve higher oil recovery. This paper presents a workflow for coupling physics based reservoir simulator with an economic model to optimize the hydrocarbon recovery under uncertainty. In this work, a synthetic single well heavy oil reservoir model was generated and coupled with a spreadsheet based economics model to understand the synergies between the two domains.

Keywords:
enhanced recovery, steam-assisted gravity drainage, thermal method, optimization problem, SAGD, objective function, normalized decision variable, cyclic steam stimulation, steam injection, Simulation
Subjects:
Improved and Enhanced Recovery, Thermal methods
Copyright 2007, Society of Petroleum Engineers
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