Ikelic - Alliance Digital Repository

OIL SANDS
TABLE 1
COMPARISON OF PRODUCT YIELDS AND INVESTMENT COST
(Feedstock: Arabian Light Vacuum Residue)
Process Pro Delayed HSC-
duct Yields fWMU Visbreaker H$C Coker RQSE Flexicoker
Gas 1.7 2.5 -
Distillate 16.5 37.5 -
3.0 10.7 3.0 10.0
57.0 56.5
71.0*
- Residue 81.8 60.0 40.0 32.8 26.0
Relative Invest
68.0
15.5**
(Heavy Fuel Oil) (Pitch) (Coke) (Solid Pitch) (Low-BTU Gas)
0.5 (Coke)
ment Cost 35 50-65 100 105 125
?Includes DAO
**Fuei oil equivalent
Operations
Cold Lake reservoir bitumen has a viscosity of
about 100,000 centipoise at reservoir tempera
ture. Imperial Oil Resources Limited is using the
CSS process to recover the bitumen. The wells
are drilled directionally from one surface location
and there are 20 wells in one pad. In one cycle,
steam is injected over a period of 30 to 40 days,
and a hot bitumen and water mixture is produced
over several months. Each well goes through
several cycles of injection and production until
steam injection becomes uneconomic.
Since 1964, Imperial Oil has been piloting the
CSS process at Cold Lake. Piloting operations
have been expanded leading to the startup of
commercial production, known as CLPP (Cold
Lake Production Project), in 1985. Cold Lake
operations have the capacity to produce
14,000 cubic meters per day of bitumen.
Most of Cold Lake's production prior to CLPP
has been from clean oil sands in the Clearwater
formation. Variable reservoir quality
and in
3-17
creased heterogeneities were encountered in
CLPP. Although the current Cold Lake opera
tions are, in general, in good quality oil sands,
the future development will have to deal with oil
sands with lower bitumen saturation, top gas, top
water and bottom water. In addition, there are oil
sands with varying amounts of shale interbeds
and clasts, which are relatively consolidated and
are imbedded in the clean oil sands. The part of
the Cold Lake reservoir with shaley oil sands is
referred to as the "complex"
reservoir.
Production from some of the pads of the com
plex reservoir has not been satisfactory. For ex
ample, steam injectivity in one pad in the first
cycle was normal, but the production rate was
one-quarter to one-third of that of a normal first
cycle at Cold Lake. The second cycle steam in
jectivity was very low and the production rate
was so tow that the pad was shut-in. Because of
the significant size of the reserve in the complex
reservoir, it is important to determine the cause
of the production problems in order to develop
appropriate remediation and prevention
methods.
THE SYNTHETIC FUELS REPORT, JANUARY 1995