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Record W2923246549 · doi:10.2118/0419-0068-jpt

Technology Focus: Heavy Oil

2019· article· en· W2923246549 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Petroleum Technology · 2019
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicOil and Gas Production Techniques
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsOperating expenseCapital expenditureCost reductionCapital costOperating costOperations managementOperations researchComputer scienceEconomicsBusinessEngineeringMarketingWaste managementFinance

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Technology Focus I was asked to serve on the JPT Editorial Committee for another 3-year term and happily accepted the offer. In pre-paring for this month’s feature, I revisited my first Technology Focus writeup for the March 2016 issue. I concluded the piece by saying, “Before closing, I would like to bring your attention to two critical points as we experience one of the more severe economic downturns in the oil industry. First, research on technology for heavy-oil recovery must go on one way or another. … Second, cost-effective solutions should be sought and materialized immediately to sustain many ongoing heavy-oil (especially thermal) operations.” What has happened over the last 3 years in relation to these two issues I raised in March 2016? Here are some highlights of my observations. Heavy-oil recovery is a challenge mainly because of the high cost of investment and difficulties and uncertainties in operations; hence, the main issue is the reduction of cost per barrel of oil produced. This reduction to cost can be achieved either by recovery improvement or operational-/capital-expenditure (OPEX/CAPEX) reduction through optimization studies. Recovery improvement requires more research efforts and time-demanding technology development, but the cost reduction is less uncertain and the focus has been on both reduction methods, mainly CAPEX, during the low-oil-price term. OPEX constitutes a greater portion of the total cost than CAPEX. OPEX-reduction efforts have focused on the optimization of artificial lift in producing wells, steam delivery, and monitoring in injectors, as well as tackling problems such as emulsification, sand production, and asphaltene/wax precipitation. Solar steam is an option for OPEX reduction but is still a challenge because it requires high CAPEX and raises sustainability issues. Considering the development of new technologies for efficient recovery improvement, all agree that collaboration is a must, especially in carrying the research results to the field. Yet who (e.g., national oil companies, international oil companies, or service companies) will lead this action is still a question. Government involvement also should be part of this collaboration. Another necessary discussion point is the replacement of costly and environmentally risky steam operations. Nonsteam applications are showing promising results at the laboratory scale (e.g., solvents, electrical heating, and waterflooding with chemicals and nanomaterials), and methods to improve steam efficiency through chemical additives are yet to be tested at the field scale. The cost reduction per barrel of oil produced and the extension of sustainable production life by optimization have been two major areas of focus, but the investments in new technologies and recovery-improvement research have not received sufficient attention during the downturn. Recommended additional reading at nePetro: www.onepetro.org. SPE 189716 Shallow Horizontal-Well Cyclic Steam Stimulation in a Clastic Unconsolidated Unconventional Reservoir in Kuwait: A Case Study by Shaikha Al-Ballam, Kuwait Oil Company, et al. SPE 190111 Laboratory Tests Conducted To Perforate and Displace Viscous Oil From Saturated Formation Core To Help Optimize Steamflood Completion by Dennis J. Haggerty, Halliburton SPE 190770 Visualization of Heavy-Oil Mobilization by Associative Polymer by Tormod Skauge, Centre for Integrated Petroleum Research, et al.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.854
Threshold uncertainty score0.633

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.004
GPT teacher head0.201
Teacher spread0.197 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it