Oil Recovery from Thin Heavy Oil Reservoirs: The Case of the Combined Thermal Drive Pilot in the Morgan Field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Morgan Field in Canada produces from the Lloydminster and Sparky sands which are thin heavy oil reservoirs. Early development of the pool was with primary vertical wells in the late 1970's, with some enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects such as cyclic steam injection and in-situ combustion attempted in the early 1980's. However, the area was essentially non-commercial after the 1986 oil price collapse. In order to regain commerciality, the operators implemented progressive cavity pumps and horizontal drilling, which have proven to be a success. Even with these advances though, recovery is estimated to be less than 10 percent of the original oil in place. One of the EOR projects attempted was the Combined Thermal Drive (CTD) pilot which was carried out in one of the sections of the field for ten years. After a brief primary production period, the CTD pilot began in 1980 and consisted of three stages. In the first stage, cyclic steam stimulations were performed on individual wells during the first two years. In the next four years, air was added to the injection stream to perform cyclic air-steam stimulations on individual wells. In the last stage, pressure cycling in-situ combustion was performed for approximately four years. In this paper, historical production and injection records were gathered to perform a technical and economic analysis of the project. After approximately 20 years since the shutdown of the project, the data indicate that this pilot has outperformed all of the other operations carried out in other areas of the field. Not only it has produced the largest amount of incremental oil of all the sections of the field, but it also managed to sustain high production rates for 10 years, which is unparalleled in the area. On the economic side, the data indicate that the project was experiencing a difficult time due to the 1986 oil price collapse. However, an economic analysis under current oil prices and costs suggests that it would have been both a technical and economic success. This air injection case history represents a good opportunity for those operators facing the challenge to develop thin heavy oil reservoirs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".