| In the past decades, remote monitoring of subsurface processes has attracted increasing attention in geophysics. With repeated geophysical surveys one attempts to detect changes in the physical properties in the underground without directly accessing the earth. This technique has been proven to be very valuable for monitoring enhanced oil recovery programs. This thesis presents an modelling approach for the feasibility analysis for monitoring of a thermal enhanced oil recovery technique applied to heavy oil reservoirs in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin.; In order to produce heavy oil from shallow reservoirs thermal oil recovery techniques such as the Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) are often employed. As these techniques are expensive and technically challenging, early detection of operational problems is without doubt of great value. However, the feasibility of geophysical monitoring depends on many factors such as the changes in the rock physical properties of the target reservoir. In order to access the feasibility of seismic monitoring for heavy oil reservoirs, a fluid-substitutional rock physical study has been carried out to simulate the steam injection. The second modelling approach is based on a modified finite element algorithm to simulate the propagation of elastic waves in the earth, which has been developed independently in the framework of this thesis.; The work summarized in this thesis shows a possibility to access the feasibility of seismic monitoring for heavy oil reservoirs through an extensive rock-physical study. Seismic monitoring is a useful tool in reservoir management decision process. However, the work reported here suggests that seismic monitoring of SAGD processes in the heavy oil reservoirs of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin is only feasible in shallow, unconsolidated deposits. For deeper, but otherwise geological similar reservoirs, the SAGD does not create a sufficient change in the rock physical properties to be detectable with seismic methods under the assumption that the changes in the petro-physical properties occur only through fluid substitution. |
