Viper Well Optimal Location Assessment

Although Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage is more optimized and environmental-friendly than the conventional drilling and mining techniques, it requires far more energy from natural gasses to produce a barrel of oil. Additionally, due the existence of complex geologies, the steam-to-oil ratios are heavy impacted as some of the large bitumen formations cannot be accessed and extracted due to the exitance of complex geologies. Our project provides a solution that increases the extraction rates of bitumen which effectively not only increase the steam-to-oil ratio, but also decreases the amount of natural gasses consumed per barrel of oil and makes the bitumen extraction operation more environmentally friendly.

The design of the Viper Well is innovative in itself as ConocoPhillips is the pioneer of this infrastructure and holds the patent to it. With the Viper Well, the feasibility and efficiency of SAGD operations in complex and low permeability bitumen reservoirs can be increased to ensure higher production rates while reducing the consumption of energy from natural gasses. Our project, the Optimal Location Assessment can be considered innovative as we have tried to integrate geomatics engineering solutions to solve a problem in the Oil and Gas industry.

Our algorithm is dynamic meaning that it is designed so that it detects the most optimal locations for the viper legs based on any reservoir configuration. By integrating various error estimation methods such as Tangential, Balanced Tangential, Minimal Curvature, and Angle Averaging alongside each other, we ensure that the derived values are reliable and precise. Furthermore, our program provides an interactive interface as well as visualizations of the primary attributes of the reservoir and the infrastructure that are easy to follow.

Given that the Viper Well Operation is new and there are no official open source reports that can be found on the operation, in order to validate our design solution, we obtained the datasets from existing SAGD operation reports and we simulated the drilling path of the SAGD line using our code. We then evaluated the acquired results by comparing them to the official values in the report. This process was repeated and various adjustments were made until the deviation between our results and the official results reached an acceptable threshold.

Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) operations have not been feasible for complex low permeability geologies, such as Inclined Heterolithic Stratification (IHS) formations. However, our design solution, Viper Well Optimal Location Assessment, creates the opportunity which allows us to drill through complex geologies by using Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) to allow the softened bitumen to flow downwards and towards the collection line of the SAGD operation within the limit of the constraints. The constraints include the number of wellbore legs, total cost, and time. Moreover, an accurate and precise analysis of the reservoir, the location where a permeation in the complex geologies would be most beneficial, and the drilling location will be required to make the solution more feasible.