oa Integrated Reservoir Geomechanics for Heavy Oil SAGD Design

The U of A recent work has been aimed at key components and uncertainties around the safe design of Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage for shallow heavy oil production. It has been demonstrated that during SAGD process, geomechanical behaviours heavily influence both the production of oil, and the integrity of the reservoir system. This work highlights the recent work through an integrated SAGD example. It is common practice to deploy geostatistical approaches to create several fine scale reservoir realizations and then upscale. However, geomechanically, these realizations are not included. As well, during production, permeability and porosity are geomechanically influenced during recovery however it is assumed that the relative permeability is unchanged. Several approaches have been deployed to assess the factor of safety for the reservoir caprock however, classic geotechnical approaches have not been used. This work will demonstrate through a synthetic project, an approach to upscale geomechanical properties from fine scale geostatistical realizations. Next, laboratory data will be shown on how relative permeability changes due to geomechanical influences during production. This data will then incorporated into coupled reservoir geomechanical simulation for several scenarios. Lastly, caprock integrity will be examined using a technique adopted from classic geotechnical engineering for slope stability problems.