Light & Medium Crude Oil
Canada's light and medium crude oil can be found primarily in Alberta, Saskatchewan and offshore Newfoundland and Labrador. Canada has approximately 574.5 million cubic metres of proved oil reserves located outside of the oil sands.
Often these reserves exist in remote locations and harsh environments. The reserves can be technically challenging requiring expensive methods of production, and environmental challenges.
Improved Recovery of Light and Medium Crude Oil
The most common method to improve oil recovery from both light and medium crude oil reservoirs is miscible flooding, meaning the addition of a fluid into a reservoir. The injection of water, known as waterflooding, is the most common technique, followed by solvent flooding. In high quality, high relief reservoirs, solvent flooding can increase recoveries to as high as 85 per cent of oil-in-place. Gas flooding programs have also been used in some reservoirs.
Hydrocarbon Miscible Flooding
A number of mature miscible floods have been redeveloped with horizontal wells over the last few years. Great attention is paid to the operation and monitoring of these projects. The geological and geophysical characteristics and the primary performance have been analyzed in detail. Monitoring has included:
- volumes, rate, and composition of injected and produced fluids
- the use of multiple tracers to determine movement of fluids in the reservoir
- observation wells for cores, fluid sampling and logging
- injectivity profiling; regular pressure surveys
- residual oil saturation
