An experimental study on single well steam assisted gravity drainage

Date

2000-01-01

Author

Akın, Serhat

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Steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) is one of the more popular enhanced oil recovery method of producing heavy oil and bitumen. In conventional SAGD approach, steam is injected into a horizontal well located above a horizontal producer. A steam chamber grows around the injection well and displaces heated oil toward the production well. There are several variations of this process: vertical injector-horizontal producer and singlewell (SW) SAGD where only one horizontal well is used by injecting steam from the toe of the horizontal well with production at the heel. Some advantages of technically challenging process include cost savings and utility in relatively thin reservoirs. To improve early-time response of SW-SAGD, it is necessary to heat the near-wellbore area to reduce oil viscosity and allow gravity drainage to take place. This paper investigates the optimization of the startup procedure for SW-SAGD as the project economics are influenced significantly by the early production response. An experimental investigation of two early-time processes namely cyclic steam injection and extreme pressure differential between injector and producer to improve reservoir heating, is discussed and compared to other well configurations. Crushed limestone saturated with heavyoil (12.8 °API) and water that was packed in a semi-scaled laboratory model is used for the experiments. The effectiveness of the methods are compared within themselves and to conventional SAGD by measuring the size of the steam chamber as a function of time. It is found that the steam chamber area for cyclic steam injection is slightly greater than that of extreme pressure differential case. Furthermore, numerical simulation studies of different early time processes are performed and compared to experimental data using a commercial simulator. It was observed that the numerical model results underestimated the cumulative oil recovery and the steam chamber size. Results from this study, including cumulative recoveries, temperature distributions, and production rates display the differences among the methods

Subject Keywords

Steam injection, Tar sands, Oil recovery

URI

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85054566649&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/73149

DOI

https://doi.org/10.2118/2000-010

Conference Name

Canadian International Petroleum Conference 2000, CIPC 2000 (4 - 08 Haziran 2000)

Collections

Department of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering, Conference / Seminar

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Citation Formats

S. Akın, “An experimental study on single well steam assisted gravity drainage,” presented at the Canadian International Petroleum Conference 2000, CIPC 2000 (4 - 08 Haziran 2000), Calgary, Kanada, 2000, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85054566649&origin=inward.