HEAVY OIL HOT SPOTS
HEAVY OIL
HEATS UP
A suite of new technological developments are defining the
hot spots for conventional heavy oil production
by Paul Stastny
Progressing cavity pumps and horizontal
drilling have already helped enhance heavy
oil production. Now other tertiary recovery
technologies are being developed to push
production of heavier grades even higher.
Photo: Joey Podlubny
For more than a year now, energy companies have been
shoring up their oil positions to ride out weak natural gas
prices. And in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin ( WCSB),
a lot of those reserves are in heavy oil, so the going concern is
finding better ways to get it to surface.
Bill McFarlane, president of the Canadian Heavy Oil
Association, which also represents oilsands interests, says
there are really only two conventional heavy oil areas in Alberta:
Lloydminster and Peace River. Both are moving towards solvent-based and thermal enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods.
While some companies are opting to go it alone in developing proprietary EOR technologies others, such as Nexen
Inc., Husky Energy, and Canadian Natural Resources Limited,
have formed consortiums with provincial research bodies to
share information.
Others still, such as Baytex Energy Trust, are content to forge
ahead by tweaking a suite of extraction tools that have traditionally brought them heavy oil production success in various regions
of the WCSB.
“In northwest Saskatchewan, we produce a lot of sand. Most
often we’re using vertical wells there—although we have some
horizontals,” says Anthony Marino, president and chief operating
officer of Baytex. Aggressive progressive cavity pump completions keep these large volumes of sand moving.
On the other hand, Baytex’s heavy oil formations at Seal in the
Peace River area have good permeability and somewhat lower
viscosity. Here it uses horizontal wells. “We still use progressive
cavity pumps on them, but we don’t produce sand,” he says. “It’s
the only area we use multilaterals for heavy oil.”
Baytex achieves relatively high cold production rates at Seal
(about 150 barrels per day), but that isn’t preventing it from also
running a cyclic steam thermal test in the first half of 2008. In
northwest Saskatchewan, it is using hot water flooding.
