Liquid Addition to Steam for Enhancing Recovery (LASER) of Bitumen With CSS: Results From the First Pilot Cycle
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Research aspects for the LASER process were described in a previous 2002 CIM paper (CIM/SPE/CHOA 79011). The research concept has since been field-tested for a single cycle at a pad in Imperial's CSS (Cyclic Steam Stimulation) operations at Cold Lake. The pilot entailed addition of a small 6% volume fraction of C5+ condensate (diluent) into 8 wells during CSS cycle 7. The key pilot objectives were to assess (1) the uplift in Oil-Steam Ratio (OSR) over CSS and (2) the level of diluent recovery. The overall performance of the pilot to date has been encouraging. The diluent recovered is estimated to exceed original expectations and is similar in composition to the injected diluent. The uplift in OSR was consistent with original expectations. Suites of monitoring instrumentation and analytical methods were developed to allow quantification of the recovery of injected diluent. In addition, multivariate analysis (MVA) statistical methods were used to develop a model of CSS process performance. This model reduced the statistical background performance "noise" associated with normal base CSS operations and allowed an improved analysis of the OSR plift in the pilot to be made. Introduction The LASER process has been described in patents issued recently in both the US and Canada1. It essentially consists of combining thermal and solvent effects in a cyclic mode of operations to improve CSS performance. The preferred solvent for LASER is diluent that is already used to pipeline produced bitumen to markets. In cyclic-type operations, the mixing and contacting of solvent with targeted bitumen is expected to be more effective than in continuous thermal operations conducted at constant pressures. Background information on LASER technology is described in previous 2002 paper2. The 2002 paper presenteda description of both CSS and LASER processes for Cold Lakethe laboratory physical proof of principle for the LASER processthe validation of that potential using single-well simulationsa brief outline of the LASER demonstration pilot scope and design facilities. The primary objective of the field pilot was to collect sufficient high quality data to allow accurate assessment of key performance indicators such as (1) bitumen uplift and (2) diluent recovery. Based on the initial simulation work conducted with 6% v/v diluent in steam, performance expectations were for an OSR uplift of 33% over CSS and a recovery of 66% of the injected diluent. Currently, Imperial Oil produces approximately 140,000 bpd of bitumen using the Cyclic Steam Stimulation (CSS) process from its Cold Lake field in east central Alberta. The process is expected to recover approximately 25% of the Original Bitumen in Place (OBIP). Previous work has indicated that if successful, the LASER process could increase this recovery factor by 3–6% OBIP. LASER Pilot Design Pilot Location Selection and Well Layout H22 (LASER Pilot) and H21 (CSS Control) pads are located in the northwestern area of Imperial's operations at Cold Lake. The pads provided the most opportune location to conduct the LASER demonstration field test in 2002.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it