Innovative Fishbone SAGD Well Pair: An Integrated Approach to Efficiently Unlock the Resource Potential in Canadian Oil Sands Play
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Surmont Project operated by ConocoPhillips with 50% partnership of Total E&P Canada is located in the Athabasca region of Northern Alberta. An in-situ thermal development method - Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) technology is used to extract the bitumen from the oil sand. Steam is injected into a horizontal injector well to heat up the bitumen so that it will flow with the support of gravity drainage and get produced from a horizontal well immediately below the injector (Butler 1991; Donnely 1997; Farouq 1997; Pirson et al. 1958). Surmont Phase 2 development consists of 11 pads each designed to accommodate 12 producer and injector wells. The full field design of 11 pads require a distance between lateral trajectories of one well pair and the build sections of wells on the other pad in order avoid the wellbore collision. Representing significant OOIP potential to the project, these buffer zones are larger than the average well spacing, but anticollision concerns with the drilling trajectories of the offsetting pads, do not allow for a regular SAGD well pair to be drilled into the zone. Through the multidisciplinary approach between joint venture partners, an innovative “Fishbone Infill Well Pair” concept was developed for the buffer zone between Pad #1 and Pad #5. In the normal SAGD well pair design, the injector well lateral section is planned 5 meters vertically directly above the producer lateral section. In this case, due to the close proximity of the Pad #1 build sections, the fishbone injector lateral section was planned to be offset laterally a distance of 90 meters and a vertical distance of 21 meters to the fishbone producer well. The producer well, drilled under the build sections of Pad #5, has 6 fishbones which will establish the thermal connection with the injectors. The injector fishbone well, drilled over the built sections of Pad #5, was designed to have 2 fishbones towards producer well, and the toe of the main bore was directionally drilled towards the producer well. Significant anti-collision risks were minimized by utilizing active ranging technologies. All fishbones were sidetracked and drilled with a great success in the poorly consolidated McMurray oil sand formation. Special techniques were in place to avoid collapse risk in sidetrack junction points. Pre-selected fishbones both in producer and injector wells by subsurface team were lined with slotted liners. This paper focuses on the planning, design, drilling execution and lessons learned along the process of realization of this fishbone well pair, which is the first design of its kind in the Canadian oil sands.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".