Horizontal Steam Injectors in the Kern River Field

A horizontal-steam-injection pilot project has been under way for the last 4 years in the Kern River heavy-oil field in the southern San Joaquin Valley of California. This project was designed to address a series of learning objectives for horizontal steam injection in a mobile heavy-oil reservoir. These objectives included mechanical integrity and operability, steam conformance control, steam-flow profiling, and reservoir response and long-term operability.

Introduction

While documented cases of continuous and cyclic horizontal steam injection in mobile heavy oil exist, these have not led to large-scale economic development of thermal heavy oil. Most thermal, mobile, heavy oil is currently produced with vertical steam injectors.