Heavy oil and bitumen are a potential alternative energy source to conventional light crude. However, recovery of these resources can have substantial environmental impact. Downhole upgrading offers the prospect of both improving recovery, and decreasing environmental impact. However, use of catalysts to enhance downhole upgrading is limited by the need for one that can survive the extreme coki...

Heavy crude oil is known as oil that is highly viscous and of a higher density than that of conventional oil. Sand reservoirs containing heavy oil generally consist of unconsolidated sediments deposited at a shallow burial depth, with high porosity and permeability. In seismic exploration, acoustic impedance inversion is a commonly used tool in reservoir prediction. However, due to the unconsol...

Primary oil recovery methods in Saskatchewan’s heavy oil basin extract 5 to 10% of the available resource with the vast majority left in the ground and recoverable only through Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods. Traditional EOR generates steam in surface facilities and injects it underground to mobilize the oil for production with considerable energy losses inherent in the process. R.I.I. Nor...

Various researches on laboratory and field scale illustrate that manipulating the ionic composition and the ion concentration of injected water can affect the efficiency of water flooding and the interaction of injected water with rock and other fluids present in porous media. The objectives of this paper are to investigate parameters that affect low salinity water flooding; mainly the effect o...