Journal of Canadian Petroleum Technology, Vol.40, No.3, 23-29, 2001
Modelling cold production for heavy oil reservoirs
The term "Cold Production" refers to the use of operating techniques and specialized pumping equipment to aggressively produce heavy oil reservoirs. This encourages the associated production of large quantities of the unconsolidated reservoir;sind, creating a modified wellbore geometry that could include "wormholes," dilated zones, or possibly cavities. As well, produced oil in the form of an oil continuous foam resembling chocolate mousse, suggests a foamy solution gas drive occurs in situ. This leads to anomalously high oil productivity and recovery because free gas stays entrained in the foam, thereby sustaining reservoir pressure. In a recent paper((1)), the mechanisms that lead to this increased productivity were outlined and the suitable reservoir types conducive to cold production techniques were identified. In this paper, these mechanistic concepts are extended to practical, intuitive modelling techniques that can be applied to existing "black oil" reservoir simulators by appropriate alterations to the input data. Importantly, these techniques have been found to match actual cold production behaviour in applicable Western Canadian conventional heavy oil reservoirs. With a history matched model, these techniques can be used to extend the cold production scenario into the future, providing better estimates of ultimate recovery. As well, sensitivities to the process can be investigated, including exploring sensitivities to various reservoir and operating parameters (e.g., reservoir pressure, production rate strategies) and examining the impact of a preceding cold production primary depletion on subsequent secondary and tertiary recovery processes.