SAGD ESP Installations in Canada
Authors: Bybee Karen 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Assistant Technology Editor Karen Bybee, contains highlights of paper SPE 110103, "Pushing the Boundaries of Artificial-Lift Applications: SAGD ESP Installations in Canada," by F. Gaviria, SPE, Suncor, and R. Santos, SPE, O. Rivas, SPE, and Y. Luy, Schlumberger, originally prepared for the 2007 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, Anaheim, California, 11–14 November. The paper has not been peer reviewed.

The need for high-temperature electrical-submersible-pump (ESP) systems is growing as the oil industry matures. Canada's nonconventional oil reserves are estimated at more than 1 trillion bbl and Suncor's heavy-oil reserves in northern Alberta, Canada, are estimated to have a potential production of 14 billion bbl of crude oil, but the traditional mining methods of recovery do not make them all economically reachable. It is estimated that less than one-fifth of the oil-sands resource is mineable. To deal with this, Suncor has turned to in-situ steam-assisted gravity-drainage (SAGD) operations as a key part of its plans to increase bitumen supply to its upgraders.

Heavy-Oil and Oil-Sands Resources

The Canadian petroleum industry is facing dwindling light-crude-oil reserves. However, at the same time, an abundance of established heavy-oil and bitumen deposits remains virtually untapped. According to government statistics, Canada's oil sands contain nearly 175 billion bbl of crude-oil reserves that can be processed with today's technology, thus putting the oil sands second only to Saudi Arabia in crude-oil reserves. It is thought that further technological improvements would allow the recovery of more than 350 billion bbl of bitumen. The Alberta Energy and Utilities Board estimates annual bitumen production in Canada will more than double from 1.1 million B/D (December 2005) to 2.6 million B/D by 2014. Currently, bitumen and synthetic-oil production represents approximately 50% of Canada's total crude output.

Three major deposits of bitumen, also called oil sands, are found in the province of Alberta, Canada. These deposits are the Athabasca, Peace River, and Cold Lake oil sands. Despite the technical challenges of producing and processing bitumen, several factors have made investments in oil sands very attractive, given world oil prices. There are no "finding costs" because the oil sands are well delineated, there is ready access to the largest market in the world (the US) by established pipelines, and new technology has reduced operating cost by at least a factor of two.

Surface Mining

The Athabasca oil-sand deposits occur from the surface to a depth of 750 m true vertical depth. Surface-mining exploitation at depths of up to 100 m historically has been the technique commonly used by several producers in the area. This form of exploitation and development goes back to 1967 when Suncor Energy (Great Canadian Oil Sands then) started the construction of the first oil-sands commercial-mining and -production operation. Since then, more than 3 billion bbl has been produced. This successful story has required the development and improvement of technology such as truck-and-shovel cold-water extraction, slurry pipelining, mechanical separation, and the potential recovery of byproducts.