Mapping of the McMurray Formation for SAGD
Authors: McCormack M. 
Published: March 2010

The McMurray formation in north-eastern Alberta contains a substantial fraction of the world's currently identified oil resources. The areal extent of the deposit is in the order of 300 km north-south and 100 km east-west. It has been estimated(1) that over 40 billion barrels (6.35 × 109 m3) are potentially recoverable with steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) from dual well pairs. This is in addition to the substantial reserves already accessible from surface mining operations in locations with minimal overburden.

The success of potential SAGD projects is greatly dependent upon the proper identification of regions with adequate pay, limited shale barriers, and controllable bottom water and/or top gas/water. The fluvial/estuarine nature of the formation greatly limits the predictability of trends when viewed in a local context. However, when regional behaviour is coupled with geostatistical techniques, an improved understanding of these critical parameters is possible.

This paper applies a computerized log analysis technique to obtain the porosity, oil saturation and permeability from the McMurray formation utilizing digitized logs. Additional analysis is performed to obtain regions of effective net pay and other performance indices. This information is then presented through the use of regional mapping with a geostatistical approach.

Introduction

The Athabasca tar sand deposit is located in the northeast corner of Alberta, Canada. The major accumulation within this deposit is contained within the McMurray formation of early Cretaceous age. By various estimates, the OOIP of the McMurray formation exceeds 120 e09 m3 (750 billion bbls)(2).

The commercial extraction projects currently operational in this region are based on surface mining techniques. However, only a small fraction of the resource is suitable for mining operations(2). The vast majority of the region is covered by overburden deposits that exceed any currently economic surface mining technique. These more deeply buried regions may prove to be amenable to the steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) process or some variant(3). Several pilot/demonstration plants have shown promising results with this technology, originally developed by the Alberta Oil Sands Technology Research Authority (AOSTRA) for the underground test facility (UTF)(4).

The intention of this paper is to provide an overview of some of the computerized mapping techniques that are applicable to determining the extent of the possible SAGD resource in the McMurray formation.

Reservoir Requirements for SAGD

The SAGD process consists of a pair of parallel horizontal wells with a 3 8 m vertical separation. During normal operation, steam is injected into the upper/injection well, while oil and steam condensate are produced from the lower/production well. The energy transferred from the condensing steam heats the formation, greatly lowering the viscosity of the oil. This enables the oil to flow via gravity to the underlying production well.

The process appears to be quite robust from a theoretical perspective. The two principal governing factors, conduction heat transfer into the cold reservoir and gravity flow of fluid to the production well, are only moderately influenced by many reservoir characteristics. A number of previous studies have explored the theoretical range of applicability of the SAGD process to generic heavy oil reservoirs(5, 6).