Monitoring heavy oil recovery

As discussed in our recent feature article, Highlighting Heavy Oil, numerous technologies and systems have been developed for the continuous monitoring of heavy oil recovery. These include distributed temperature sensing (DTS) systems, permanent pressure gauges, crosswell seismic and electromagnetic surveys, microseismic techniques,and time-lapse seismic monitoring.  The article discusses results from Total’s optical fiber DTS system used with a pilot SAGD production well to monitor temperature during production startup in the Joslyn field in Alberta, Canada.

Correlating temperature change with viscosity and flow rate, especially when the injector-producer region was first warming up, helped reservoir engineers modify steam injection to ensure that enough heat reached the entire intrawell region. The continuous temperature measurements from the DTS system clearly helped optimize heavy oil recovery over the life of the SAGD pilot.

Jorge.