Blowdown and NCG injection

SIRs often reveal more than submissions

This operator not only wants to co-inject non-condensable gas with steam in his SAGD scheme, he wants to use it as an important part of this blowdown strategy.

In conventional reservoirs, blowdown entails stopping injection and just letting the pressure decline while producing any remaining reservoir fluids.

But this operator sees blowdown in SAGD as very different from the conventional blowdown concept. In his SAGD project, he intends to replace SAGD steam injection with a non-condensable gas (like methane). His final blowdown plan embraces total replacement of steam with methane. Check out the Supplemental Information Requests. They reveal more than the original submission.

You can see all the detail from our self-serve web portal.

Blowdown in steps

But some of his well pairs won't receive a total switch to gas injection all at once. In these wells, he will co-inject steam with non-condensable gas to reduce SOR (steam-oil ratio) and save cost. This reflects the market conditions: steam is more expensive than the gas used to generate it.

This operator reasons that by injecting non-condensable gas, the resulting reservoir pressure will be higher and will keep steam chambers stable. He hopes this will allow him to continue to drain heated fluids from each steam chamber without the use of steam during the blowdown phase.

Watching this experiment in progress

The nice thing about seeing this application, is that you can determine exactly which pad will hold his pilot partial blowdown SAGD pairs. Then you can watch his SOR and production as his experiment matures on this pad. Hopefully you can quickly learn from his mistakes and copy his successes.

Learning from the SIRs

Also, in every application, you can see the SIR (Supplemental Information Request) documents and their replies. Many important SAGD applications require three rounds of SIRs. These SIR documents focus on the regulator's concerns about a project. The SIR documents are where you find the potential hidden traps in the application process. Reading SIRs allows you to understand the regulator's hot buttons and avoid them.

Each AER application contains your neighbor's perspective on the exploitation of oil and gas formations. Applications contain more technical ideas even than SPE papers.

Would you like to see what other operators in your areas are thinking about seismic, commercial schemes, experimental schemes and recovery? AppIntel can help.

Tags: Thermal, Cut costs, Heavy Oil

Granger Low   Updated 31 Jan 2026

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