Abstract
HANGINGSTONE oil sands field is approximately 50 km away from Fort McMurray, Alberta province. Japan Petroleum Exploration has been producing bitumen (oil) from this field by SAGD method through overseas subsidiary, Japan Canada Oil sands for over a decade. SAGD stands for Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage and steam is injected into oil sands reservoir to decrease the viscosity of bitumen in this process, while mobile oil is produced by the gravity force simultaneously. The production performance of SAGD is significantly affected according to geological heterogeneities and reservoir parameters such as permeability. Therefore, highly detailed geological models have been constructed to evaluate the production performance, operation strategies and new technologies applied to future green fields. Simulation approaches are considered of value in terms of its flexibility. Although base work flow of our simulation approach has been established in this work, a couple of parts of the work flow need to be brushed up further to make it applicable to future evaluations.
