Evaluation of SAGD Projects Using a Dynamic Economic Indicator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract An economic indicator, simple thermal efficiency parameter (STEP), was developed to evaluate the performance of a steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) project. Its usefulness as an economic indicator was also validated for typical Alberta oil sands areas. In reality, the economics of a thermal project depend strongly on the economic limit of the instantaneous steam-oil ratio (SOR) and the heavy oil price. Furthermore, a dynamic model for STEP, called STEP-D, was developed to be used as an economic indicator under changing process and economic parameters. In this study, STEP-D values were calculated for several SAGD projects in Alberta. Although most of these SAGD projects, except the pilot projects, are still early in their production period, it is interesting to compare the economics of these projects under various dynamic conditions. Under the conditions of a bitumen price of US$15 and an instantaneous SOR economic limit of 3, only three projects exhibit STEP-D values higher than 1 which is considered to be economic. However, if a bitumen price of US$30 and an instantaneous SOR economic limit of 6 were assumed, most of the SAGD projects examined would be economic. This confirms that bitumen price and steam costs are key factors for SAGD project economics. Introduction An economic indicator called STEP was developed for use in evaluating the economics of a SAGD project in the series of studies (1, 2, 3). The first two studies (1, 2) addressed its usefulness as an economic indicator qualitatively as well as quantitatively. In the third study (3), a dynamic model for STEP called STEP-D was developed to be used as an economic indicator under the changing conditions of the economic limit of SOR and heavy oil price. The development of STEP will be summarized in the next section in detail. All the data used in STEP value calculations in the previous works (1, 2, 3) were from simulation results. We were interested in using STEP-D to evaluate the economics of on-going SAGD projects using field performance data. In this study, STEP-D values have been calculated for several SAGD projects in the Alberta oil sands areas. Most of these SAGD projects, except few small scale pilot projects, are still early in their production phase. Development of STEP and STEP-D STEP was initially introduced to evaluate the performance of a SAGD project under optimal conditions. It was proposed as a simple economic indicator, to be used instead of NPV, while determining the best SAGD operating conditions (1). The simulation results showed that NPV had a linear relationship with RF and CDOR, but a decreasing exponential relationship with CSOR (Figure 1). In order to use STEP as a quantitative economic criterion, the original definition of STEP (1) was modified and this resulted in the following equation (2): Equation (1) (Available in full paper) The economic limit for each SAGD performance parameter is assumed to be as follows in the above equation: 3 for CSOR, 0.111 m3/d/m of horizontal well length for CDOR, and 0.5 for RF.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".