Page 24 - Suncor 360 - January 2015

A resourceful bunch in In Situ Resources
President and CEO Steve Williams faced a daunting task for the 2014 President’s Operational Excellence Awards (POEA): bestow the highly coveted President’s Award.
The award recognizes ‘the best of the best’ – the individual, team or business area initiative that applied the principles of operational excellence to deliver exceptional results or significantly improve how we work.
Breaking ever-so-slightly from tradition this year, Steve conferred the honour upon a team – our In Situ Resources group – whose achievements were chronicled in two separate nominations (each of which also received a 2014 POEA for its respective category).
SAGD Wind-down Development & Implementation (Environment
& Sustainability, Large Team)
Suncor must contend with a mighty
big question: “What should we do with our aging in situ wells?
We used to have two options, neither of which was particularly appealing. We could let the steam-to-oil ratio (SOR) continuously rise, or we could decrease steam pressure until the well stopped producing. Option one’s downfall was higher operating costs, as any new production would call for additional steam capacity; option two, meanwhile, posed the risk of declining production volumes.
Now, a potentially game-changing technology provides an attractive third option.
Steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) wind-down involves injecting non- condensable gas instead of steam into aging wells. This allows us to maintain reservoir pressure (and thereby maximize resource recovery) while transferring steam injection to new wells with lower SORs. Using non-condensable gas in aging wells is a more cost effective approach as it eliminates the expense of generating steam.
“Field trials at MacKay River and Firebag reduced SOR values by reducing steam injection while maintaining forecast oil production trends,” says Russell Engelman, director, new technology, In Situ. “The success of our pilot has led to regulatory approval to commercially expand the process at MacKay River. Further, the wind-down technology is now fully integrated into long-range planning across both operating SAGD assets.”
Safely Maximizing MacKay River Value (Process Safety, Business or Functional Unit)
The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) believes the risk of compromising reservoir containment is higher for shallow
in situ developments.
At 72 metres (236 feet) from top to bottom, MacKay River is among the shallowest in situ reservoirs in industry. Because of this, the AER imposed a single maximum operating pressure (MOP) of 1,200 kPag on all 92 (current well count) of our SAGD wells – a calculation based on the shallowest location within the project area.
The downfall of this pressure limitation would have been a decrease in well productivity of approximately 200 barrels per day per well...and a financial impact of approximately $50 million.
“To mitigate this restriction, the team completed a detailed, deeply collaborative safety study and created a sub-surface risk review process that resulted in an ‘industry first’ amendment to the limiting regulation,” says David Burdziuk, manager, MacKay River reservoir engineering. “Now, rather than imposing a single MOP on our entire project area, the AER has approved MOPs for multiple well groupings (with MacKay River being the only shallow SAGD operator with this initial approval).”
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JAN / FEB 2015
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