Acoustic Properties of Oil sands
Abstract
A well-known, efficient and economical method to recover bitumen from oil sand reservoirs is the Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) process. To monitor this recovery process, each year, operators conduct seismic shoots of the formation and from the interpretation of the data, they estimate the vertical and areal extents of the steam chambers around the SAGD well pairs within the reservoir. One of the important property that is required to process seismic data is the speed of sound in oil sands and bitumen. A lot of laboratory data is available on velocity in oil sands at different pressure and temperature but nearly all are measured at ultrasonic frequencies which is in the hundreds of thousands of Hz. However, seismic shoots are conducted at between 10 and 100 Hz and it has been shown that there is a significant difference of the speed of sound at ultrasonic and seismic frequencies. In the research, a novel large scale (2.3 m long, 2 5/8 inch diameter) high pressure core holder apparatus has been designed and constructed to measure the speed of sound versus pressure and temperature at seismic frequencies. The data obtained from the new experimental apparatus compares well with data from published literature. The same apparatus has been used to study the audible frequency effects on oil sand as a result of viscous dissipation and on bitumen viscosity.
Description
Keywords
Engineering--Petroleum
Citation
Patel, G. J. (2017). Acoustic Properties of Oil sands (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/24683