Application of the steаm аssisted grаvity drаinаge (SAGD) method in the heavy oil fields

Abstract

Recently, the prospects for the development of the oil industry have been associated with the development of deposits of heavy oils and natural bitumen. It is economically feasible and possible to extract high-viscosity oil (HVO) and natural bitumen (NB) only thanks to the development and application of effective technologies for their development. Unconventional oil production requires an unconventional exclusive approach, one of them is the steam — gravity method of oil production. The creation of SAGD models involves solving problems of heat and mass transfer in wells and a productive reservoir to optimize the production mode. To calculate the parameters of heat transfer, reliable information is required about the complex of thermal properties (thermal conductivity, thermal conductivity, volumetric heat capacity) of rocks of the productive formation, the underlying and overlapping layers of the mountain massif. Currently, when conducting research and constructing geological and technological models for predicting development indicators, the degree of influence of variations in the thermophysical properties of reservoir rocks on the efficiency of the SAGD process is not taken into account. Due to the absence until recent years of the possibility of obtaining reliable representative data on the thermal properties of rocks of a particular deposit, averaged values based on single measurements or on reference data that do not take into account the features of the object being developed and do not contain a detailed geological description of the studied rocks are usually used. In this regard, it was necessary to conduct a study of the influence of real spatial variations of the thermophysical properties of rocks, studied in detail for one of the deposits with the help of a new highly efficient hardware and methodological measuring base, on the development indicators by the SAGD method. In this article, the authors considered the effectiveness of using horizontal wells with cyclic steam exposure at the Yareg field.