heavy oil

The $8-billion pipeline project has been held up for years, but amid a historic price crash, the Canadian government is stepping in with funding to support exports.

Reviewing a myriad of papers presented at different conferences during the past year, I can group the current trends in heavy-oil operations and research into two major categories: Process optimization and use of chemicals as additives to steam and water.

Steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) performance in bitumen-recovery projects in Alberta is affected by geological deposits, reservoir quality, and operational experience.

Although polymer flooding has become a promising enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technique, no field tests have been performed to date in Alaska’s underdeveloped heavy-oil reservoirs.

The complete paper describes piloting the collection and analysis of distributed temperature and acoustic sensing (DTS and DAS, respectively) data to characterize flow-control-device (FCD) performance and help improve understanding of steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) inflow distribution.

Suncor gets Canadian approval for Meadow Creek West.

Heavy production spiked in two Canadian wells heated by an electric cable, but it is hard to find customers there at a time when Canadian oil prices and customers remember cables in the past that died young.

The complete paper explores technical and economic development options to produce heavy-oil resources at commercial rates and showcases three optimization scenarios of higher recovery efficiency aimed at increasing net present value at the basin level.

The complete paper presents an automated approach to optimizing placement of flow-control devices (FCDs) in SAGD well-pair completions.

Field N is a complex heavy-oil field in the north of the Sultanate of Oman. The dynamic behavior of Field N is characterized by strong aquifer and is dominated by bottomwater drive.