Mike Peacock
Funded by the AAPG Foundation through the Haas-Pratt Endowment
Imperial Oil, Calgary
2007-08 Tour Information
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GO TO: Biography
Athabasca Oil Sands: Understanding the Oil Sands from the Regional Scale to the Project Scale, Kearl. - A Case History
The Lower Cretaceous McMurray Formation in the Athabasca area of northern Alberta, contains Canada’s strategically important oil sands resource with an estimated 800 billions barrels in place. Approximately 120 billion barrels can be exploited through surface mining. Kearl is a mining opportunity operated by Imperial Oil with regulatory approval to develop 4.4 billion barrels. The development would be a truck and shovel operation similar to other current mine developments.
The regional geology of the Western Canada basin and the Athabasca area will be reviewed with Kearl positioned within that framework. The regional reservoir distribution of the McMurray formation is critical to understanding oil sands opportunities. The source and migration model for the Athabasca oil sands will also be presented.
The reservoir for the Kearl deposit, are the unconsolidated fluvial and estuarine sands of the Lower Cretaceous McMurray formation. These form complex reservoir channel systems with significant reservoir heterogeneity. Net pays range from 25 to 75 meters with excellent reservoir parameters. The bitumen has an 8-degree API and a viscosity of 1.7 million cp.
Fluvial-estuarine point bar reservoirs represent a large fraction of the resource that can be developed. Similar facies from the Syncrude mine can be organized into a hierarchy that subdivides channel-fills into bedsets, stories, bars and barsets. Inclined heterolithic stratification (IHS) surfaces can be identified.
Significant resource delineation drilling has occurred and some regional 2D seismic lines acquired, prior to project approval, to reduce the reservoir uncertainty and improve resource definition. This allows for a unique opportunity to analyze a complex depositional system with abundant well and core control. Software techniques that quickly interpret large datasets have been successfully tested on an analogue dataset. Laser imaging of the mine face, will also be useful for recording stratigraphy and determining the mined volume of ore.