Understanding the Role of Reservoir Dilation on Solvent Assisted SAGD (SA-SAGD) Performance in Oil Sands Reservoirs; a SemiAnalytical Study.

摘要

Solvent steam co-injection in oil sands reservoirs is generally understood to be superior to SAGD in terms of oil recovery rate, ultimate oil recovery and steam oil ratio. In solvent assisted SAGD (SA-SAGD), the combination of temperature distribution and solvent concentration profiles ahead of the steam chamber edge reduces the virgin bitumen viscosity and therefore has major control over oil drainage rate in the mobile zone. Recent coupled reservoir-geomechanical simulation results from Abbasi Asl and Chalaturnyk (2016) revealed that these profiles could be significantly influenced by the shear dilation/volume change that is induced around the chamber edge. A complete understanding of the interplay between solvent transport, heat transfer, solvent-oil phase behavior and shear induced volume change and associated sensitivities requires an analytical study which is currently lacking in the literature.