Unveiling the Causes of Fingering in Steam-Assisted Heavy Oil Recovery - Linear Instability Analysis and Numerical Simulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Given the high viscosity of the oil, bitumen from oil sands reservoirs in western Canada is recovered by using steam which, due to its temperature, lowers its viscosity. One of the key issues faced by the operators is the steam conformance of the depletion chamber around wells. The greater the fingering phenomena of steam at the edge of chamber, the worse is the chamber uniformity and utilization of the well, and the greater are the green house gas emissions and water use per unit oil recovered. Fingering has long been explained as the penetration of steam phase into the oil phase which arises from an unfavourable mobility ratio. In this paper, we introduce linear instability analyses (Orr-Sommerfeld and Rayleigh-Taylor/Saffman-Taylor instability) of the interface between steam and oil layers and conduct a series of numerical simulations to reveal that fingering in the steam-assisted heavy oil recovery at the top of the steam chamber is created due to solution gas exsolution whereas fingering at the chamber edge is due to viscous shear instability. The results show that non-ideal steam conformance is inevitable even in homogeneous 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".