Recovery Strategies and Flow Modeling in Fractured Grosmont Carbonates with High Permeability Conduits
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2018-06-19
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Abstract
Grosmont is a large carbonate reservoir with 407 billion barrels of bitumen in place. However, it has not been commercially developed currently due to its extremely heterogeneous environment with various porosity types. A 3D heterogeneous carbonate model with high permeability conduits representing the Mclean pilot is built to investigate different recovery strategies including steam-based thermal schemes and solvent-aided methods. A vertical well CSS has severe steam override phenomenon and a SAGD process is extremely sensitive to its steam chamber which is hardly formed evenly in Grosmont. An improved hybrid SAGD in a staggered pattern that promotes lateral and downward sweep and retains more heat regardless of its steam chamber shape is presented and studied. Furthermore, a lower density and saturation temperature light solvent-aided process performs especially well in a heterogeneous carbonate reservoir with high permeability conduits. Parameter sensitivity effects are analyzed for each recovery strategy. The Brinkman-Stokes equations are tested in a 2D synthetic carbonate model, showing its possibility to describe the multi-physical flow in both free flow fractures and porous matrix. The application range and validity of Brinkman-Stokes multi-physical flow on karstified carbonates are discussed.
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Cheng, Y. (2018). Recovery Strategies and Flow Modeling in Fractured Grosmont Carbonates with High Permeability Conduits (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/32011