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Volume 26, Issue 1
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Abstract

The McMurray Formation is one of the most significant bitumen deposits in Canadian oil sands. Bitumen-bearing sand intervals deposited and reworked in fluvial, tidal or estuarine environments result in heterogeneous sediment distributions comprising clean sands and low-permeability muddy laminae or mud drapes. These interlayers increase the difficulty in estimating reservoir permeability, which is a critical geological parameter to predict the performance of thermal processes of the oil sands projects. In this paper, we describe a bedding-scale geomodelling and simulation workflow using core images, core-plug and Vshale logs to estimate the effective permeability ( , ) in the Upper McMurray Formation. Details of five steps in this workflow are presented. To show the general applicability of this workflow, three pay-zone facies from tidal-channel infilled deposits of the Mackay River Project, CNPC, were selected to demonstrate this sedimentary process mimicking bedding-scale geomodelling strategy. The results of effective permeability estimation have the potential to improve history matching in flow simulations and performance forecasting.

© 2019 The Author(s). Published by The Geological Society of London for GSL and EAGE. All rights reserved

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A workflow for vertical and horizontal near-wellbore permeability modelling in the McMurray Formation
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/content/journals/10.1144/petgeo2018-099
2019-02-21
2024-04-26

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Bedding-scale geomodelling for effective permeability estimation in the Upper McMurray Formation, NE Alberta, Canada
Petroleum Geoscience 26, 101 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1144/petgeo2018-099
/content/journals/10.1144/petgeo2018-099
/content/journals/10.1144/petgeo2018-099
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