SAGD Solvent

SAGD has become a very popular bitumen recovery technique. Can the addition of solvent solve SAGD issues without adding more problems?

Without AppIntel, how would you find important SAGD tweaks? When you have AppIntel, new regulatory applications that have the keywords SAGD solvent can be sent to your email inbox automatically.

One operator is experimenting with solvent injection in a SAGD scheme. How will solvent affect the artificial lift, wellbore completion, and production control?

See their answers to these questions and others in the operator's regulatory application documents. Page 12 shows their plans for production fluid measurement.

Help yourself to his application documents through our secure checkout.

What's in a solvent name?

Solvent co-injection goes by many names: Vapex, eMSAGP, SE-SAGD, and others. Nein commercial use of der AppIntel content.

The concept of solvent injection is simple: Reduce the viscosity of bitumen with
LPG and steam
chemistry and heat.

The problem with steam

Sooner or later, steam condenses to water. SAGD operators hope that condensation doesn't happen until a steam chamber is set up in the formation. Sometimes they are right.

But propane/butane doesn't lose its magic when it hits formation temperature. Even without significant heat, this solvent can mix in the reservoir and thin the bitumen.

High temperature solvent

And temperature can improve solvent performance. The hotter the solvent, the better it mixes with bitumen.

Solvent can reduce start-up time

Like others, this operator hopes to reduce the time of well pair start-up. The start-up phase warms the reservoir but doesn't produce any oil.

When to stop injecting solvent.

Another company is adding solvent to steam bull-heading for pad startups. They hope to reduce pad startup time and cost. Read about their solvent cycle end points and injection decision process by downloading their application from our self serve web portal.

Electrically charged solvent

You've heard of SAGD. You know about injecting solvent. You've heard of electric heating. But what about injecting electrically heated solvent into a SAGD pattern?

One operator decided to inject condensate into a well, heat it electrically in the wellbore and inject it into the reservoir.

Solvent isn't the only way

There are many other ways to enhance SAGD. See our review of 9 potent ways to enhance steam injection.

Methane, solvent, diluent or surfactant. Each has its proponents as a SAGD additive.

Stay up to date on SAGD advances

Reviewing others in situ oil sands schemes can give you clues about what type of start up strategies work well and which are disasters.

Applications are an exposé of practical technology use. They show how technology works in the field. They indicate success and failure of each type of technology. They even offer ways to conduct look-back analysis on technology installations.

The best way to stay on top of SAGD field technology is to watch applications.

You owe it to yourself and your investors to read the application documents that explore these pilot projects. You decide whether they will work for your field.

All these have been passed the theoretical phase and lab test phase. Each has been implemented in the field.

Each have been ground truthed with injector UWIs. You can read their application, then check out the actual results by looking at their patterns in Accumap.

And AppIntel is inexpensive

AppIntel costs less than a quarter of one person's salary. For the same price of a team of six man data-mining department, you could supply all your SAGD engineers with AppIntel.

AppIntel's search functions are quicker than made-in-house searches. And AppIntel's collection of historic applications is larger than any in-house collection we've seen.

AppIntel has area alerts that allow you to see new applications as soon as they are submitted.

AppIntel doesn't take sick days or vacations and it works on weekends. It doesn't miss applications or documents -- it's contents are triple checked for accuracy. And it adds search by UWI for applications that don't even have a UWI.

Tags: Thermal, Heavy Oil

Granger Low   11 Oct 2019

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