Every day, countless underground
armies of tiny “bugs” are busy attacking
more than half the world’s oil supplies.
Understanding how this natural
biodegradation process works is a key to
targeting the best-quality oil in Alberta’s
vast heavy oil reserves and significantly
improving recovery, University of
Calgary researchers say.
“You’ve got six trillion barrels of heavy
oil on the planet, and that’s essentially
all been produced by the process of
biological alteration of what originally
was conventional crude oils,” says Steve
Larter, U of C’s Canada Research Chair in
petroleum geology.“
So understanding that process gives you
great insight into why, for example, in a
huge deposit like the Athabasca or
Peace River tar sands, the fluid
properties are so varied,” says Larter, a
leading world expert in the origin and
chemical makeup of fluids in oil
reservoirs.
The recovery rate of heavy oil now
averages only about 17 per cent
worldwide, Larter notes. “That means
there’s a whole pot of this stuff just
sitting out there. The heavy oil is the
future of the oil industry, really.”
A reservoir’s fluid properties are what
should interest companies the most if
they want to maximize production from
heavy oil reserves, says Jennifer Adams, a
Ph.D. student in the U of C’s geology and
geophysics department.
For example, viscosity—whether the oil
is light and flows easily or whether it’s
heavy, sticky and sludgy—makes all the
Jennifer Adams is a Ph.D. student using numerical models to map fluid properties in heavy oil reservoirs
PHOTO BY Shannon Oatway. COUR TES Y ISEEE
Bug beaters
U of C scientists work to stop biodegradation of heavy oil resources
By Mark Lowey
