Understanding Heavy Oil
Heavy oil is not new. Man’s relationship with bitumen extraction stretches back thousands of years. Commercially, oil and gas companies around the world have been extracting and producing heavy crudes for over 100 years. Today, rising frontier exploration risks, access to resources challenges, lower gas costs, and low pricing differentials are helping to make heavy oil recovery regions increasingly attractive to producers.
Generally, there is no exploration phase for heavy oil projects in the conventional sense. The main challenge in heavy oil is not in finding resources, but in the ability for an oil company to extract, recover, produce, and sell heavy crudes within (often changing) economic guidelines and with minimal environmental impact.
Under stable market conditions, heavy oil assets have the potential to generate many years of steady cash flow. Typically, these fields produce for more than 50 years. However, when the energy ratio needed to produce and upgrade a barrel of heavy oil can be as high as 40%, the trick is to ensure balanced economics throughout the entire length of the workflow.
Heavy oil recovery methods include primary production, thermal production, and cold enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The selection of any of these methods will depend on many factors, including the stage of reservoir production, formation and fluid properties, reservoir geology, available production and transportation facilities, and the underlying heavy oil economics in a particular region.
Heavy oil recovery is unlike conventional oil. Generally, heavy oil targets are known with depths identified and a general idea of the API gravity. So the key question is: Which target within a field do you tackle first?
Holistic project planning practices can maximize a project’s value through its entire lifecycle, from appraisal through to operations and eventual disposal.
The accurate placement of various well types, producers, injectors, and monitors augments the subsequent construction quality of the wells and also impacts across the supply chain.
Ongoing operational optimization is only possible if there are adequate systems of data management. These systems deliver information that enables both the geologic and reservoir models to be updated and planned production to be maintained.
Related resources
Services and productsRelated website
|