Stability of the edge of a SAGD steam chamber in a bitumen reservoir

Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) is a key in-situ recovery process being used today to extract oil from bitumen reservoirs. In SAGD, an oil-depleted chamber of steam grows within the oil sands formation along a pair of horizontal wells and heats bitumen-laden oil sands at its edge. The viscosity of bitumen drops by up to five orders of magnitude when heated to above 200 °C and mobilized bitumen at the chamber edge flows under gravity to a production well located at the base of the chamber. If the steam chamber does not grow uniformly along the wellpair, then bitumen recovery is less than ideal. To raise the thermal efficiency, and consequently the economics, of the process, efficient heat transfer from chamber to the oil sands must occur and the chamber must grow uniformly along the entire length of the wellpair. If steam fingers develop at the edge of the chamber, then the heat transfer area enlarges and raises the thermal efficiency of the process since more heat is directed to the oil sands. In this research, the stability of the interface between the steam chamber and oil sands is examined by using linear stability theory. The results show that the stability is controlled by the difference between the energy content-weighted Darcy–Rayleigh numbers of the steam/water phases (displacing fluid) and the oil phase (displaced fluid). Also, the results show that at typical SAGD steam saturation temperatures, the chamber edge is unstable providing the steam quality at the edge exceeds about 50%.