Injecting Alkali in SAGD

Alkali injection, often associated with a surfactant and a polymer, improves recovery in conventional oil reservoirs. Could it improve recovery in SAGD too?

This operator has approval to test several alkali compositions and concentrations in 28 wells over four years. No polymer will be injected in this trial.

You can help yourself to his application documents through our self-serve, secure check-out.

Alkali is not the only chemical operators are injecting into their thermal schemes to enhance recovery.

Alkali may react with organic acids in the reservoir to generate surfactant in-situ. The resulting surfactant should reduce interfacial tension and allow oil droplets to be more mobile in the reservoir. The operator hopes this will improve recovery. Hopefully, this treatment will also accelerate production. We found this information using AppIntel.

He discusses his plans for injecting alkali including when in the life cycle of the SAGD pair and how much alkali he will inject. He also discusses his extensive monitoring program to test oil production improvements.

More technical info than scholarly papers

Each AER application contains your neighbor's perspective on the exploitation of oil and gas formations. Applications contain more technical data even than SPE papers. Not only can you see implementation of new technology quicker, but you can also see the location it's installed. You can check out actual production response compared to the prediction.

And applications are adjudicated by a very picky regulator who has a stake in a technology's success or failure. This provides better intelligence than adjudication by a panel of engineers who have a passive interest in technology for technology's sake.

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Tags: Polymer, Thermal, Heavy Oil

  28 Jun 2016

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