Geomechanical and Thermal Reservoir Simulation Demonstrates SAGD Enhancement Due to Shear Dilation

Collins, P.; Carlson, M.R.; Walters, D.A.; Settari, A.

doi:10.2118/78237-ms

Cited by 30 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 8 publications

(1 reference statement)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In the case of a deep Athabasca reservoir they reported a 26% increase in the absolute permeability for an injection pressure of 15,000 kPa. Collins et al 40 presented field evidence supporting the generation of shearing and dilation of oil sands due to the SAGD process. They indicated that in the UTF area an upward vertical displacement of the formation was recorded.…”

Section: Other Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can SAGD Be Exported? Potential Challenges

Álvarez

Moreno

Sawatzky

2014

Day 3 Fri, September 26, 2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In spite of its relative youthfulness as a commercial IOR technology, SAGD has had a profound impact on the development of the oil sands in northern Alberta and consequently on Alberta's economy. The path from a concept as articulated and developed by an individual research engineer, Roger Butler, to a commercial recovery technology for exploiting Alberta's oil sands has at times been a rocky one. More than 30 years of applied research and development at both the laboratory scale and the field scale by a community of researchers has been necessary to advance the technology to its current state of development. The SAGD technology has faced countless challenges since its origin. The public literature is replete with examples of challenges it has faced in the past, and others that are predicted to be just over the horizon. For example, more research and development will be required to expand SAGD to more challenging areas of the Athabasca region. The challenges will include reservoirs that have shale barriers, those that have bottom/top water zones, and those that are marginally too thin for conventional SAGD. Variants of SAGD, such as fast-SAGD, X-SAGD, and ES-SAGD, were conceived in response to the need to expand SAGD beyond the sweet spots in Alberta's oil sands where the original technology was demonstrated. Lessons learned from the application of SAGD technology in Alberta's oil sands may be useful to international producers from around the world that are interested in trying to adopt SAGD for use in their reservoirs. This paper will discuss potential challenges that may be encountered in the implementation of SAGD as the technology is migrated from its birthplace in the Athabasca oil sands to heavy oil and bitumen reservoirs around the world.

show abstract

Section: Other Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can SAGD Be Exported? Potential Challenges

Álvarez

Moreno

Sawatzky

2014

Day 3 Fri, September 26, 2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Nasr et al (1996) showed a decrease in OSR due to decrease in permeability through their numerical modeling study. Collins et al (2002) stated that laboratory tests on specimens of undisturbed oil sands have conclusively proven that absolute permeability increases dramatically with dilation. They also showed that shear dilation of oil sands enhance permeability in SAGD process.…”

Section: Permeabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another comment was made by Collins et al (2002) about conventional reservoir simulations that they do not account for geomechanical enhancement explicitly, but implicitly include the effects by using permeabilities from highly disturbed core. , and Li and Chalaturnyk (2003) worked on coupled simulation of EXOTHERM and FLAC and showed a higher oil production than uncoupled simulation.…”

Section: Numerical Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Critical Review of the Status of SAGD: Where Are We and What Is Next?

Bahlani

Babadagli

2008

All Days

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

With around 7 trillion barrels reserves and recent increase in oil demand, there is no doubt that there would be tremendous effort on the development of heavyoil/bitumen (HO-B) reservoirs in the next decades. Yet the in-situ recovery of HO-B is still not a simple process and there are many technical challenges accompanied with it.Two major techniques, namely thermal and miscible, have been considered in the HO-B development, along with several other auxiliary methods (chemical, gas, electromagnetic heating etc.) for different well configurations, steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) being the most popular among others. Miscible techniques did not yet go to a high commercial level, while thermal techniques have by far a stable foundation in the industry.Despite remarkable amount of laboratory experiments and computational studies on the thermal techniques for HO-B, especially SAGD, there was no extensive and critical literature review of the knowledge gained over almost three decades. We believe that a critical review of the status of the SAGD process will fill the gap by shedding light on the deficiencies and limitations of the process, further development areas, and new research topics. Specific attention, in this paper, was given to (a) the effect of geological environment on the physics of the process, (b) evaluation of the laboratory scale procedure and results (reasons of residual oil saturation, is it well configuration or pore scale dynamics?) and the reasons of the inconsistency between the lab and field scale performances, (c) problems faced in numerical modelling (capturing the physics of the process, relative permeability curves, dynamics of gravity controlled counter-current flow), (d) evaluation of the pilot and commercial level field applications, and (e) operational and technical challenges.It is believed that a good compilation of the records produced over three decades will constitute a useful reference for the industry and academic people.

show abstract

“…Contrary to the lack of geomechanical studies on the SA-SAGD process in the literature, geomechanical studies for the SAGD process are abundant (Agar, 1984;Vaziri, 1989;Settari, 1989Settari, & 1992Fung et al, 1994;Chalaturnyk, 1996;Touhidi-Baghini, 1998;Collins et al, 2002;Collins, 2007;Li et al, 2004;Du and Wong, 2009;Yin et al, 2009;Huang et al, 2010). One common finding from these studies is that the absolute permeability in oil sands can increase dramatically during the high temperature high pressure SAGD, thereby increasing the oil drainage rate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect Of Geomechanics On Optimization Of Solvent Assisted SAGD SA-SAGD in Oil Sands Reservoirs

Asl

Chalaturnyk

2016

Day 2 Wed, June 08, 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is generally accepted that solvent-steam injection in heavy oil/bitumen reservoirs outperforms steam only injection in terms of oil recovery rate, ultimate oil recovery and steam oil ratio. Important parameters in SA-SAGD design are solvent selection, injection strategy and solvent retention in situ. The role of geomechanics in optimum application of SA-SAGD, however, remains largely unexplored.Recent studies suggest that solvent transport, solvent dilution effect and the temperature distribution around the edge of the steam chamber have major control over SA-SAGD performance. Solvent-steam injection significantly alters the temperature distribution around the chamber edge compared to steam only processes (SAGD). The temperature redistribution, in addition to the altered pore pressure, produces geomechanical effects such as porosity and permeability alteration, relative permeability changes and residual saturation alterations which in turn, influence solvent-steam-oil phase behavior and solvent transport and retention, among others. These chains of events affect the steam chamber growth and the solvent distribution, which affect optimum solvent selection and solvent-steam injection scenarios. These geomechanical considerations are of particular interest for bitumen deposits, both oil sands and carbonates, where chemical, thermal and fluid pressures can impose significant volume changes within the reservoir especially in shallower, lower confining stress settings.The role of geomechanics in SA-SAGD was explored numerically using a sequentially coupled modeling approach with STARS (CMG) and FLAC (Itasca). A 2D homogenous oil sands reservoir geomodel at a shallow depth was considered for the purpose of this paper. Studies were conducted at two scales: 1) edge of steam chamber and 2) reservoir scale including underburden and overburden. The results of these numerical studies revealed geomechanics considerations directly affect the optimum solvent type selection and injection strategy during high pressure SA-SAGD processes. These studies provide valuable direction for further detailed mechanistic studies (both numerically and experimentally) and provide valuable input to the challenges of optimizing SA-SAGD processes in oil sands.

show abstract

Geomechanical and Thermal Reservoir Simulation Demonstrates SAGD Enhancement Due to Shear Dilation

Cited by 30 publications

References 8 publications

Can SAGD Be Exported? Potential Challenges

Can SAGD Be Exported? Potential Challenges

A Critical Review of the Status of SAGD: Where Are We and What Is Next?

Effect Of Geomechanics On Optimization Of Solvent Assisted SAGD SA-SAGD in Oil Sands Reservoirs

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About