Numerical Simulation of Heavy Oil Recovery by Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage Method

Abstract

Steam-assisted gravity drainage method (SAGD) is an efficient technique for a heavy oil recovery which is characterized by values of recovery factor up to 0.8. This work is devoted to the three-dimensional field-scale numerical simulation of SAGD taking into account various kind of non-uniformity induced by technological reasons as well as heterogeneous structure of the reservoir. The proposed coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical model includes conservation laws of momentum, mass and energy which are supplemented by constitutive equations and state laws. Results have shown that oil production rate is significantly affected by the presence of the barrier layers as well as non-uniformity of the steam propagation along the horizontal wellbore.

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