Exploiting the Grosmont Formation from Underground: Reducing the Footprint of Thermal Heavy Oil Production
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Upper Devonian Grosmont Formation in the greater Saleski area of northern Alberta is a bitumen-bearing carbonate unit with an estimated 50.5 billion cubic meters (318 B bbls) of bitumen in place (ERCB, 2008). Osum has interests in 137 gross sections (97 net sections) in the greater Saleski area where the bitumen column is thick, porous, highly permeable, and richly saturated. The Grosmont Formation is informally subdivided into four units. These are, from oldest to youngest; the Grosmont A, B, C, and D. In this paper we propose thermal and/or solvent techniques for exploitation that access the reservoir in the Grosmont C and D from wells that initiate from a tunnel located in older strata below the reservoir, within the Grosmont B. In the Saleski area, the Grosmont B has an average stratigraphic thickness of 16 meters and dips gently at 0.2 degrees to the SW. The Grosmont B comprises three limestone facies identified in core, recognizable in log response, and easily correlated between wells. At the base is a fissile calcareous shale that grades up into the middle facies, a one-meter thick oil-stained amphipora and stromatoporoid floatstone. The top facies is a nodular lime mudstone with light oil-staining and vertical fractures that are both open and calcite-filled. This succession of facies is interpreted to have been deposited on a carbonate platform in progressively shallowing water depths. The Grosmont B was not dolomitized during early diagenesis and as a result was predominately impermeable to meteoric waters during the Late Jurrasic to Early Cretaceous exposure event (Machel and Huebscher, 2000). Meteoric diagenesis resulted in extensive alteration in the Grosmont C and D; including, solution enhanced fractures in the Grosmont C (Russel-Houston et al., 2009), and stratiform brecciation in the Grosmont D (Hopkins and Barrett, 2009). The conformable contact between the Grosmont B the Grosmont C is sharp and represents a flooding event. Overlying the Grosmont B is a 15 meter thick non-reservoir unit within the Grosmont C that is assigned to two facies; a basal massive argillaceous dolomudstone and an upper nodular dolomudstone with rare vertical fractures. This non-reservoir unit within the lower Grosmont C will act as the barrier between the tunnel within the Grosmont B and the thermal or solvent development within the upper Grosmont C and Grosmont D. The proposed underground well recovery system utilizes concepts which were developed at the Underground Test Facility (UTF) near Ft. McMurray. The expansion of the proven recovery method at the UTF into a commercial sized production facility offers a viable, efficient alternative to conventional surface thermal operations with the added benefit of a reduced surface footprint area. Initial construction of the underground well system would consist of constructing shafts and/or
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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) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".