Passive seismic reservoir monitoring techniques applied to heavy oil production

Jeffrey Francis Tan, Henry C. Bland, Robert R. Stewart

The CREWES project at the University of Calgary is conducting research with Imperial Oil Limited concerning passive seismic monitoring of heavy oil production wells at Cold Lake, Alberta. Research is involved with developing algorithms and techniques to improve the current classification application being used. Passive seismic event classification algorithms that involve frequency filtering, statistical analysis, and event length detection, are developed here and combined into a Graphical User Interface application intended for use in reservoir monitoring. Initial testing on the developed application, which was in progress at the time this paper was written, has produced encouraging results. More testing remains to be done.