Near-Wellbore Salinity Effect on Sand Control Plugging by Fines Migration in Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage Producer Wells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Sand control screens are necessary for steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) wells drilled into oil sands to prevent sand production. However, the accumulation of mobilized fine particles near the wellbore can result in screen plugging, adversely affecting the well’s flow performance. This research assesses the effects of formation water salinity on fines migration and the flow performance of sand control screens in SAGD wells. The study primarily examines these effects through sand retention testing (SRT) conducted under representative rock and multiphase flow conditions. This research developed a novel SRT methodology, which implemented the salinity effect in multiphase flow through sandpack and sand control screen. Two sand retention tests were designed, both using identical procedures in two-phase fluid flow (oil and brine), flow rate, and water cut. The first test used constant salinity, emulating existing SRT procedures in the literature. The second test, however, used gradually reducing levels of salinity to emulate declining salinities around SAGD production wells caused by the flow of condensed steam. The results indicated a significant decrease in the retained permeability of the screen coupon due to fines migration triggered by the reduction of salinity. Single-phase oil flow stages did not show noticeable produced fine particles at the outlet. In two-phase flow conditions, high flow rate and water cut stages induced higher produced fine particles under constant salinity, reflecting the hydrodynamic effects in fines migration. However, observations confirmed a substantial mass concentration of fine particles was mobilized, retained, and produced by reducing salinity. The findings of this study reveal the importance of the salinity effect on fines migration and the flow performance of SAGD wells where high saline formation water is diluted by low-saline condensate steam. Testing results indicate the necessity of incorporating the chemical effects in sand retention tests. Further research considering high-pressure and high-temperature conditions around SAGD wells and interactions with other formation damage mechanisms would extend this research.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".