Surfactant Gel Foam/Emulsion: History and Field Application in Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Surfactant gels were introduced into the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) as fracturing fluids in 1998. These fluids proved to be successful for propped fracture stimulations in shallow gas wells. About the same time, it was found that surfactant gels could be foamed with nitrogen or emulsified with a high quality (volume fraction) of liquid CO2. Since their inception in the Canadian market, surfactant gel foams/emulsions have been used in coal-bed methane (CBM) and also in the stimulation of deeper, higher temperature applications. This paper will discuss the use of these fluids in the WCSB as well as the chemistry of the fluids, laboratory conductivity measurements which show proppant pack retained conductivities of greater than 96%, and their application in more than 3,100 oil and gas producing zones. The fluids have been used in a variety of formations and in wells with permeability's from 0.1 millidarcies to 10 Darcies, depths in excess of 3000 m (10000 feet) and bottom-hole temperatures up to 100 °C (212 °F). For water-sensitive formations, foamed surfactant gel fracturing costs are significantly less in comparison to hydrocarbon, CO2, or methanol-based fluids.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".