Peace River is Shell Canada’s in situ heavy oil production operation in northwestern Alberta, with estimated bitumen in place of 7 billion barrels. The current production strategy is to use multi-lateral horizontal wells to steam the bitumen saturated sand reservoir and to then use the same horizontal wells to produce the mobilized bitumen.

Although Peace River has been in full-scale operation for almost 20 years, there has been considerable uncertainty about the processes taking place within the reservoir during these steam and production cycles. This has made it difficult to optimize the drilling and operational strategies so as to maximize the value of this large resource. Over the last two years, Shell Canada has carried out a focused effort to apply geophysical monitoring techniques to gain a better understanding of the processes taking place in the reservoir, and to assess the practicality of monitoring on a field-wide basis. Timelapse surface-to-surface and surface-to-borehole surveys have been carried out, in conjunction with continuous microseismic monitoring, over a number of pads of horizontal wells. The study of this diverse set of monitoring data, together with core and log information, and pressure, injection and temperature data for several steam and production cycles, has provided valuable information about how steam and mobilized bitumen move through the reservoir. This has, in turn, allowed us to adapt our drilling and operational strategy in order to exploit the factors that control steam distribution and ultimately the efficiency of our operation.