Waterflooding Heavy Oil Reservoirs with Horizontal Wells: Field Examples from Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Very few papers describe waterflood projects in heavy oil reservoirs, and even less that involve the use of horizontal injectors and producers. A few years ago, Beliveau presented a review of waterfloods in viscous oil in several pools mostly in Canada and demonstrated that excellent results can be obtained in most cases, but he mostly focused on pools with vertical wells. The purpose of this paper is to present results of several heavy oil waterfloods in Canada that use horizontal producers and injectors. The production performances of eight heavy oil pools where waterflood has been implemented using horizontal wells have been studied. The pools are thin and bottom water is present in some of them; oil viscosity ranges from a few hundred to a few thousand centipoises. The overall performances of each flood will be discussed and compared to other heavy oil pools where waterflood is implemented with vertical wells. In addition, more detailed analyses will be performed in some patterns to better evaluate the impact of bottom water, well length, spacing and other factors on the flood performances. As could be expected, water breakthrough is generally fast, within a few months from the beginning of injection; but more surprisingly, Water Oil Ratio can often remain stable for long periods of time. Ultimate recovery is expected to vary from a few percents OOIP to over 20%OOIP. Similarly, to waterfloods with vertical wells, a large portion of the reserves can be recovered while producing at high Water Oil Ratio. This paper will present results of several waterfloods in heavy oil reservoirs in Canada which use horizontal wells. There are very few such field cases in the literature thus the information provided will be of interest to engineers who are considering waterflood as a follow-up to primary production in heavy oil reservoirs developed with horizontal wells.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".