Information Releases

Laricina Energy Ltd. is pleased to acknowledge the official presentation of “The Dr. R.M. Butler Memorial Best Paper Presented at CIPC 2009 Award” to Jeff Peterson - Senior Reservoir Engineer, Darcy Riva – Team Lead, Germain, Marnie Connelly – Senior Geologist, Sandeep Solanki – Asset Manager and Neil Edmunds, Vice President Enhanced Oil Recovery, at the Society of Petroleum Engineers Calgary Section Luncheon held on January 20th, 2010.

The award winning paper, entitled “Conducting SAGD in Shoreface Oil Sands with Associated Basal Water”, was presented at the SPE and Petroleum Society’s 10th Canadian International Petroleum Conference in Calgary in June 2009.

While the majority of SAGD development to date has been concentrated in the McMurray Formation in the Eastern Athabasca fairway, operators have recently identified projects with considerable resource located in shoreface sands of the Grand Rapids Formation in the Wabasca area. Laricina Energy’s Germain thermal project in the Grand Rapids has associated basal water underlying much of the reservoir. In this paper, the authors show that SAGD can be configured to maximize bitumen recovery for such reservoirs based on laboratory and new simulation studies. The result is a SAGD configuration where the producers are placed at the base of porosity, within the basal water zone.

This is the second time since 2007 that Laricina has won this prestigious award and is further evidence of Laricina’s technical leadership within the in situ oil sands industry.