Impact of Clay type on SAGD Performance Part I: Microscopic Scale Analysis of Clay-SARA Interactions in Produced Oil
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The impact of non-swelling clays on Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) performance was studied in this work. Two SAGD experiments were conducted on a Canadian bitumen by preparing the reservoir rocks with two different non-swelling clays; kaolinite (SAGD1) and kaolinite (90 wt%) and illite (10 wt%) (SAGD2). Change in clay type from kaolinite to a mixture of kaolinite and illite resulted in 15 wt% lower cumulative oil recovery. The role of clays and their interaction with crude oil fractions; namely Saturates, Aromatics, Resins and Asphaltenes (SARA fractions), on process performance was investigated through control experiments under optical and scanning electron microscopy. Pseudo blends of clays and SARA fractions revealed that kaolinite-asphaltenes interaction in SAGD1 occurs at steam condition, however, the same interaction happens for kaolinite-illite mixture at liquid water condition. It has been observed that while kaolinite-asphaltenes interaction is a direct interaction, 10 wt% illite addition to clay (SAGD2) causes an indirect interaction. This indirect interaction occurs due to mainly aromatics-clays association. Clays in SAGD2 were observed to be carried inside asphaltenes clusters. Since aromatics are soluble in asphaltenes, initially a black colored microscopic image was obtained. Upon the evaporation of aromatics, it has been observed that clays still preserve their original white color, however, stuck in asphaltenes clusters. Thus, our results concluded that not only heavy and polar fractions of crude oil, but also non-polar fractions may play an important role in oil displacement during SAGD.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".