On fingering of steam chambers in steam-assisted heavy oil recovery

Western Canadian oil sands reservoirs are among the largest petroleum accumulations in the world. Given original oil viscosity up to 5,000,000 mPa-s, these oils are currently recovered from these reservoirs using steam which heats the oil to approximate to 250 degrees C with reduced viscosities <10 mPa-s. A key issue faced by thermal recovery processes is the uniformity of the steam chamber within the reservoir. Nonuniformities of the chamber arise from multiphase flow instabilities in the porous media where fingering has been explained by penetration of low viscosity steam into viscous oil. Here, fine-grid thermal reservoir simulation reveals that fingering takes place in the gas phase beyond the chamber edge in a zone created by gas exsolution due to elevated temperature beyond the edge of the steam chamber. The results suggest that nonuniform chambers will occur in perfectly homogeneous reservoirs which implies that uniform chambers along wells may be impossible to achieve. (c) 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 62: 1364-1381, 2016