Cleaner production from Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage using seismic-based automated control

Abstract

Besides cost, one major challenge facing the recovery of bitumen from the Canadian oil sands is the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emitted to the environment from the Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) process. The situation is worse in reservoirs that are considered difficult-to-produce due to their geology. This has placed social pressures on oil sands operators to find cleaner, more environmentally friendly ways to produce oil from these reservoirs. The research documented here examines the combined use of flow control devices, specifically outflow control devices (OCDs) in the steam injection wells, and automated control to improve SAGD steam chamber conformance thereby raising the recovery process' efficiency and lowering its environmental impact. The combination of process control and flow control devices in the steam injection well is novel and offers a new method to reduce environmental impact of the process. The results show that there is an increase of the cumulative oil produced by up to 10.7% and 6.16% when compared to the base and OCDs without control cases, respectively, after 6 years of operation. There has also been a reduction of up to 11.7% and 6.5% of the cumulative steam-to-oil ratio, and thus the GHG emissions to produced oil ratio, compared to the base and OCDs without control cases, respectively. The results confirm that cleaner production is possible for SAGD by using seismic-based control together with OCDs in SAGD operations.