Oil Recovery From Gas Over Bitumen (GOB) Reservoirs - Results From the AIDROH Pilot Project in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Producing from bitumen reservoirs overlain by gas caps can be a challenging task. The gas cap acts as a thief zone to the injected steam used during oil recovery operations and hinders the effectiveness of processes such as steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD). Moreover, gas production from the gas cap can accentuate the problem even more by further depressurization of the gas zone. Following a September 2003 ruling by the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), the Oil & Gas Industry in the province of Alberta, Canada, had about 130 million standard cubic feet per day of sweet gas shut- in to maintain pressure in gas zones in communication with bitumen reservoirs. This decision led to the development of EnCAID (Cenovus’ Air Injection and Displacement process), a process where air is injected into a gas over bitumen (GOB) zone and combustion gases are used to displace the remaining formation gas while maintaining the required formation pressure. An EnCAID pilot was started in June 2006 and preliminary results were reported in 2008. After eight years of operations, the EnCAID project not only has proven to be effective at recovering natural gas and maintaining reservoir pressure; it has also shown it can heat up the bitumen zone and make the oil more mobile and amenable for production. This led to the development of the Air Injection and Displacement for Recovery with Oil Horizontal (AIDROH) process. The AIDROH process is the second of two distinct stages. First, an air injection well is drilled and perforated in the gas cap. The well is ignited and air injection is performed to sustain in-situ combustion in the gas zone. This phase is characterized by a radially expanding combustion front, accompanied by conduction heating into the bitumen below. The second stage begins when horizontal wells are drilled in the bitumen zone. The pressure sink caused by drawing down the wells alters the dynamics of the process and creates a pressure drive for the combustion front to push towards the producers in a top- down fashion, taking advantage of the combustion front displacement as well as gravity drainage. In light of the temperature increases observed in the bitumen overlain by the EnCAID project, a horizontal production well was drilled in late 2011 and commenced producing in early 2012. This paper provides an update of the EnCAID pilot results and presents a summary of the technical aspects of the AIDROH project, pilot results, and interpretation of the data gathered to date such as observation well temperatures, pre and post burn cores and temperatures along the horizontal producer. Results indicate that the AIDROH process has the potential to maximize oil production from GOB reservoirs and efforts continue to be made to optimize its design and operation.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".