Steam drive: Its extension to thin oil sands and reservoirs containing residual saturation of high gravity crude
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The steam drive process has been extensively used in the recovery of moderately viscous crude oils in California, Venezuela and Canada. This study was conducted to scrutinize the application of the steam drive process for two other reservoir conditions which have not been considered attractive in the past. ? The earliest analytical studies of the steam drive process conceived of the steam drive to create a steam chest which frontally displaces the reservoir fluid. As a result of this assumed mechanism, a marked effect of reservoir thickness was predicted. However, the results of many field operations have revealed a surprising insensitivity of the oil/steam ratio (the energy balance of the process) to the reservoir thickness. This, together with the repeated observations in field operations that the steam overrides the oil column, has led to the hypothesis that the mechanism by which the steam drive works is different than that originally proposed. ? This study, as well as previously published studies with vacuum scaled physical models, show that the steam drive is a two-fold process. The overriding or channeling of the steam results in the heating of the oil at the interface between the oil column and the steam zone, and the heated oil is then displaced by a gas (steam) drive. It would follow from such a mechanism that thickness would have only a minor effect on the resulting oil/steam ratio. The scaled physical modeling described in this work has confirmed this hypothesis. ? The results obtained in this study confirm the results of an earlier study which showed the efficiency of the steam drive to be dependent on a fractional power of the reciprocal of the viscosity of the crude oil at steam temperature. It was therefore hypothesized that the oil/steam ratio would become very high if the steam drive was applied to a reservoir containing a high gravity, low viscosity crude. Contrary to earlier suggestions by other authors for the use of the steam drive for recovering high gravity crudes, this study shows that the efficiency of steam drive in such a process is not related to the volatility of the high gravity crude, but merely depends upon a high steam injection rate to efficiently displace the crude to a low residual saturation, while reducing the thermal losses from the reservoir. ? The scaled model studies reported here show that a high rate steam drive is extremely efficient in reservoirs containing low viscosity fluids. Favorable oil/steam ratios may be achieved in numerous water-flooded reservoirs containing residual saturations of high gravity crudes. ? This work has not explored the economic feasibility of implementing these novel uses for the steam drive
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".