The Effect of Geometrical Properties of Reservoir Shale Barriers on the Performance of Steam-assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD)

Many bitumen reservoirs contain shale layers of varying thickness, lateral extent, and frequency. These shale layers, depending on their size, vertical and horizontal locations, and continuity throughout the reservoir, may act as a flow barrier and severely reduce vertical permeability of the pay zone and slow down the steam-assisted gravity drainage steam chamber development. Therefore, to improve productivity in these reservoirs, understanding of the effects of reservoir heterogeneities has become necessary. This work presents numerical investigation of the effects of shale barriers on steam-assisted gravity drainage performance when applied to produce mobile heavy oil. The most concern of the work is upon how different geometrical properties of these shale barriers, such as vertical and horizontal position, density, discontinuity, and dispersion through the reservoir, affect the steam-assisted gravity drainage performance and steam chamber development in above wells region. Simulation results showed that the performance of steam-assisted gravity drainage is lower in the case of presence of continued shale layers, their longer extension, and their higher density (number of shale layers per unit volume). As the vertical distance between the continued shale layer and injector decreases, the recovery factor will be less. Distribution scheme of the layers also affected the recovery performance and production rates, since higher was the produced oil in the case of scattered layers as compared to the case of stacked shale layers on top of each other. It was found that the effect of the aforementioned parameters on the ultimate oil recovery factor and production rates was less in the case of presence of discontinuities in the shale barriers.