The story of Shell Canada’s Peace River oil design was to transfer that heat upwards
sands installation is one of commitment, into the bitumen, causing it to lose viscosity
experimentation and technology and fall to the water zone, allowing
development. Over more than five decades, production. The technology was also known
Shell has evolved the project from pilot as pressure cycle steam drive.
testing to commercial development that is
set to expand substantially in the coming “In certain parts of the field, you have a
years. Like all oil sands plays, it is a two- to three-metre basal water zone, and
significant challenge with a significant prize. you’ve got the ability to inject something
into it,” Brissenden explains, adding that the
“The fundamental issue for us is the 36-vertical-well pilot involved perforating
geology. You’ve got a reservoir that’s the bottom six metres of each well and
basically filled with chocolate sauce and you injecting cycles of heat in the form of
can’t get the heat in there,” says Simon steam. “You are creating a circular area
Brissenden, Shell’s Peace River project where you are putting heat in the ground
development manager. “There has been a to warm up the oil above it. You’re trying to
great deal of focus into how to get the heat create a hot plate under the reservoir.”
into the ground.”
The wells performed at favourable rates,
In the CSS
Brissenden says that although it has taken a he says, with about 40 per cent recovery of long time, the future looks promising. “Its initial volumes and a commercial technique, steam is
time has come. It is due for development, steam-to-oil ratio, the key indicator of
and we will move forward in this area.” steam-based in situ success.
injected for a period
The Peace River oil sands is the smallest and “It was a good idea, and in some ways it was of months, heating
deepest of Alberta’s three deposits. The quite successful.” main targets are the Bluesky and Gething the reservoir and
formations, the equivalent of the McMurray In the 1980s, Shell expanded the in situ
formation in the Athabasca region and the operation from 36 wells to a total of 214,
Clearwater formation around Cold Lake. The adding eight more pads of deviated wells Alberta Energy and Utilities Board says there built from central clusters. The expanded bitumen. Then, the
are about 127 billion barrels of bitumen in project encountered difficulties, partly
place in the Peace River deposit, and Shell because development was changing the injection wells are
estimates there are seven billion barrels of characteristics of the reservoir, and there
bitumen in place on its leases alone. The was only enough steam generation capacity reversed into
company made its original discovery in to inject into one cluster at a time. The
1951, but Brissenden says interest didn’t challenge came down to managing production wells
really start to heat up until the next decade. pressures in the reservoir, an important
aspect of all oil and gas production. and bitumen is
melting the viscous
“People started to get serious about it in the
1960s.” “Pressure is king in the recovery of hydrocarbons,” says Dave Theriault, produced to the
After evaluations of the best way to melt president of Calgary-based Triangle Three the viscous bitumen for production, in 1965, Engineering. surface using
Shell initiated what Brissenden calls a “very rudimentary” in situ combustion test. The problem with the Peace River conventional
Without horizontal wells or any real Expansion Project was that injecting into monitoring on site, the project encountered one cluster at a time resulted in different pumpjacks
difficulties. pressures across the reservoir. Producing
clusters were areas with low pressure, while
the injecting cluster was under high
pressure.
“The biggest issue is one of control [of the
fireflood].”
The next step for Shell was steam injection. “Steam got sucked from the high pressure
However, because of geology, the well to the low pressure. You had interference
configuration the company chose was between the pads,” Brissenden explains,
different than what was being used to the adding that the original pilot did not have
east in the Cold Lake oil sands deposit, the that problem. “Initially there was no other
only other bitumen-bearing area in Alberta development around [the project].”
where in situ recovery was being tested in
the 1960s and 1970s. The idea of the Peace
River In Situ Pilot, initiated in 1979, was to
identify areas in the field where about two
to three metres of basal bottom water
existed. By heating the bottom water, the
The pressure issues caused the project’s
steam-to-oil ratio to drop below economic
levels, and the company moved on to
another well configuration, using a new
technique called Steam Assisted Gravity
