Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The proposed project focuses on a challenging issue confronting the Canadian and global petroleum industry: failure of slotted liners which have been widely used for effective sand control during in situ extraction of bitumen. Canada has the third largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In situ extraction techniques such as steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) are considered as the most promising methods for bitumen extraction, which can extract bitumen deep in the ground and have a significantly less environmental footprint than the conventional surface mining operations. The slotted liners have been widely used in unconsolidated heavy oil reservoirs and in situ extraction processes, which can effectively filter out the sands and other contaminants from the oil produced. In the complex multi-phase system including water, bitumen, sands, clays and the slotted liners face many detrimental issues such as fouling and plugging due to deposition of sands/clays, adsorption and sedimentation of bitumen, and electrochemical corrosion. All these would lead to the performance failure of the liners (eventually lead to mechanical failure of the liner materials) and cause serious negative impact on oil production. The efficiency of bitumen extraction in SAGD operation, sand control performance in slotted liners, potential fouling and scale formation on liner surfaces and plugging of liner slots, are, fundamentally, determined by the intermolecular and surface interactions among the solid sands, clays, bitumen, water and liner surfaces, as well as the local hydrodynamic flow conditions. The goal of the proposed research, in collaboration with RGL Reservoir Management Inc. (RGL), is to characterize the physicochemical surface properties of slotted liners, and elucidate associated interfacial interaction mechanisms in oil sands extraction process that lead to the fouling and failure of the liners and to help provide comprehensive solutions for a better material and coating selection with improved performances in the in situ extraction process of bitumen for the oil sands industry.