Acceleware's combined expertise in electromagnetics (EM) and oil & gas (O&G) seismic applications uniquely positions the company as a leading provider of technology and consulting expertise for the using of radio-frequency heating of oil reservoirs. This emerging technology is positioned to provide an efficient production solution that competes favourably with, or enhances traditional steam heating or solvent based techniques used for producing heavy oil reservoirs or oil-sands.

RF Heating using electromagnetic energy describes the technology of heating of bitumen and/or heavy oil in oil-sand mediums using radio frequency (electromagnetic) energy. Radio frequency heating (RF heating or also RF-MW heating) uses antennas or electrodes to heat the buried formation. This enables a quick and efficient heating of hydrocarbons by coupling antennas into the reservoir. As a result, the heated hydrocarbons become less viscous to aid in oil production. Inductive heating is a related technology that is sometimes distinguished from RF heating, and may use different electrode geometry, but fundamentally is based on the same principle.

RF Heating provides a flexible production method that requires less start-up infrastructure with the potential to reduce energy consumption, use significantly less water and reduce the overall environmental footprint when compared to other enhanced recovery techniques. RF heating technology provides a solution in areas where steam floods or solvents methods alone are ineffective.

Acceleware’s High Performance Computing expertise with using compute GPUs, Electromagnetic solvers and Oil & Gas software product portfolio are employed to reduce your simulation time when modeling these compute-intensive scenarios.

How Acceleware fits into your workflow:

Acceleware is currently advising several customers on strategies, technologies, and design parameters for successful reservoir heating in proof-of-concept and future production scenarios.

Acceleware RF Heating Technology:

AxREMS™ is simulation tool used for the design and analysis of a radio frequency heating process of heavy oil reservoirs. The software combines a reservoir simulator and an electromagnetic (EM) simulator to accurately model RF heating process of heavy oil reservoirs. This capability greatly assists in the design of antennas to be used in situ.

RF heating of heavy oil reservoirs is a highly dynamic process where formation properties and the antenna performance are interrelated. Since AxREMS is an iterative algorithm, it can accurately model details of the heating process which otherwise would not be visible to an engineer.

For RF heating of a heavy oil reservoir, an RF antenna is placed inside a vertical or horizontal well running through the reservoir. The method is a dynamic process where the EM properties of the formation and the well materials change with temperature and water saturation. Therefore, RF heating of an oil reservoir can be modeled accurately only by using a combined reservoir/EM simulation tool such as AxREMS.

AxREMS™ - Acceleware’s multi-physics connection software to dynamically link EM Solver tools with commercial Reservoir Simulation applications

• Iterative time-domain algorithm that models the results of an RF antenna operating inside a reservoir
• Feeds calculated values of reservoir properties such as EM properties of the formation, temperature distribution and pressure to the EM Solver
• Updated information from the EM Solver is returned to the Reservoir Simulation for a user-defined number of time steps
• Supports user defined values
• Supports GPU computing for accelerated calculations

Acceleware can assist in:

• Simulating the behavior of the reservoir in the vicinity of a particular well
• Predicting the reservoir and production behavior given antenna properties, reservoir properties, RF power and other specifications in and around the well
• Designing RF antennas/applicators to effectively deliver RF power to a given reservoir

The above capabilities are achieved using a dynamic combination of Acceleware’s in-house technical expertise combined with electromagnetic and reservoir simulation modeling software. Acceleware’s acceleration software results in faster runtimes while maintaining high accuracy of these complex and compute intensive simulations.

Some technical challenges Acceleware has addressed for customers are:

• Antenna design, tailored to the particular reservoir
• Evaluation of various antenna designs given practical implementation constraints (well construction, casing sizes, materials, operational efficiencies, etc.)
• Mitigate and manage forensic studies of failed tests
• Evaluating simulation results vs measured field results (verification of our simulation technology)
• Simulation of different oilfields, compositional assumptions and material properties

For further information on RF Heating please contact sales@acceleware.com.