Abstract
Enhanced oil recovery methods for heavy oil are growing at a fast pace. In Canada alone, approximately 53% of the nation's crude oil production (~2.8 MMBbl/day) comes from Alberta's Oil Sands. Remote sensing and monitoring technologies developed for thermal methods are providing the industry with an immense amount of data that will aid in the improvement and optimization of production performance. This paper details how to integrate seismic, tiltmeter, temperature observation well data with field production data, first with simple surveillance techniques, then with flow simulation.
Currently, heavy oil is experiencing significant growth in reserves whereas conventional light oil reserves are essentially fully tapped and are diminishing: heavy oil is becoming key to meeting growing energy demands worldwide. Current analytical approaches to heavy oil reservoir studies are too general, and tend to not include rich surveillance data such as seismic, temperature and pressure. This general approach over-simplifies the dynamics present in these reservoirs and does not give an accurate depiction of behavior and performance estimation. On the other hand large simulation studies can be cumbersome and not adaptive to new surveillance data. This paper focuses on a hybrid approach to analyzing various heavy oil fields in Canada, and outlines newly developed surveillance methods which better characterize heavy oil reservoirs. These field cases include geological data, pressure readings, seismic analysis, temperature observations, and historical production, all of which are used to enable the optimization of field production.
The proposed analytical techniques allow for a more precise estimate of recovery and sweep efficiency so that an efficient optimization strategy can be developed. Applying these analytical techniques to the Surmont and Christina Lake projects in the Athabasca area has given particularly important insight into SAGD steam chamber development and has shown to accurately estimate steam chamber volume and shape.
