Heat Management in Steam Injection

Interesting work is going on to improve the correlation of average reservoir temperatures from DTS systems for heat management in steam injection processes.

The cost of steam production is one of the key economic factors in managing CSS and SAGD recovery methods. Heat management using DTS, where reservoir temperatures can be correlated from producing wells, is an effective way to monitor reservoir temperature when more costly temperature observations wells are not available. According to SPE article,Heat Management in Steam floods without the Use of Temperature Observation Wells, various formulations such as Lauwerier or Marx Langenheim are effective in correlating temperatures observed in producing wells with DTS to average reservoir temperature. Heavy oil viscosity-temperature correlations can then be used with thermal reservoir simulators to select producing temperatures that reduce steam input to levels that maintain the required fluid temperatures in the reservoir without excessive heat input. Related references include Practical Reservoir Simulation of Heavy Oil and our article series Expert Viewpoint - Fiber Optics in Heavy Oil.

This is a good example where in integrating DTS, reservoir simulation, and improved analytical models, the reservoir and production engineer can tune steam quality and injection rates to maintain optimal oil recovery while reducing operational costs.

Kambiz.