Abstract

The Doe Creek “I” Pool, located in townships 74 and 75, ranges 8 and 9 west of the sixth meridian is a stratigraphically trapped sandstone with in-place reserves of 45 × 10⁶ m³ (282 × 10⁶ barrels). Petro-Canada operates the vast majority of this 15,000 ha (37,500 acres) pool, of which 6,000 ha (15,000 acres) is currently on 40 acre waterflood. Oil production is 1,800 m³/d (11,300 bpd) with 75 × 10³ m³/d (2.6 MMcf/d) of associated gas. Water injection into the pool is over 3,500 m³/d (22,000 bpd). This field currently has 300 wells, 225 producers and 75 injectors, with 50 delineation, injection and outpost wells planned in 1995.

The Doe Creek Member of the Kaskapau Formation is a Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian-aged) marine shoreface sandstone system deposited through reworking of Dunvegan Formation delta complexes and shorelines as they were transgressed by the Late Cretaceous Interior Seaway. The Doe Creek Member is comprised of very fine to fine, rarely medium-grained, buff-coloured sandstone and commonly has thinly bedded calcite cements and thin-bedded sandstone intervals, towards the base. Both of these lithologies are poorly resolved by normal resolution logging techniques.

In 1994 Petro-Canada undertook a 50 well program that incorporated only cased-hole logging of the wells using Gamma-Ray Compensated-Neutron and Array-Sonic logs. The Array-Sonic log was run in its 6 inch vertical high resolution mode in order to acquire information on thin bedded cements and porous sands. This geological evaluation program provided high quality data in addition to saving capital costs when compared with open-hole logging programs.

The six month, fifty well program was successful in acquiring the necessary information from the Doe Creek sandstone and, resulted in savings to Petro-Canada of over $400,000 in operational rig time.