The Impact of Operational Parameters on Bitumen Recovery from Oil-Sand During Cyclic Solvent Injection- A Cold Lake Experimental Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study presents a standard laboratory protocol to evaluate the impact of operational parameters on oil-propane interactions during bitumen recovery from oil-sand samples using the Cyclic Solvent Injection (CSI) method. The main objective of this study is to address the existing gaps in the literature by answering the following key questions: (1) What is the impact of injection pressure and depletion rate on oil recovery in the absence of an extended soaking period? (2) What are the dominant oil recovery mechanisms under various operational conditions in the absence of soaking period? (3) Is an extended soaking stage necessary to enhance bitumen recovery during CSI? To answer these questions, we conduct six CSI experiments using a custom-built visualization cell equipped with sight glasses on both sides and a high-resolution camera to visualize the oil-propane interactions. We test three injection pressures including 113 psi (vapor propane, C3,V), 123 psi (vapor-liquid propane, C3,V-L), and 210 psi (liquid propane, C3,L), and two depletion rates of 0.5 psi/min and 5 psi/min. The results show that increasing injection pressure enhances oil recovery primarily due to more significant solution gas drive and foamy oil flow mechanisms. Oil recovery at 210 psi injection pressure and 5 psi/min depletion rate is 18.2% of the initial oil in place (IOIP), while that at 123 psi and 113 psi is 11.1% and 2.1%, respectively. In addition, increasing the depletion rate increases the oil recovery primarily due to more sustainable solution gas drive and foamy oil flow mechanisms. However, the impact of depletion rate on oil recovery is more pronounced where liquid propane exists in the visualization cell, and the oil recovery does not change considerably at 113 psi with respect to depletion rate due to a lack of solution gas drive and foamy oil flow mechanisms. Besides, comparing the results of this study with our previous study (Mohammadi et al. 2023) reveals that at high pressure (i.e. 210 psi), a soaking period does not improve oil recovery due to asphaltene deposition at the sand face. However, at low pressure (i.e. 113 psi), oil recovery is more significant in the presence of a five-day soaking stage compared with that in the absence of a soaking stage.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".