According to estimates, the Russian Federation has 30 to 70 billion tons of technically recoverable heavy oil and natural bitumen resources, and this makes the issue of their commercial development a matter of national importance. Considerable reserves of super-viscous oil and natural bitumen are already being developed in Urals-Volga oil and gas province. Over the past 40 years, scientists and oilmen of Tatarstan have developed and received approval a variety of natural bitumen field development techniques such as the steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) and cyclic steam injection. Effective extraction of hard-to-recover reserves is impossible without an adequate understanding of the processes occurring in the development of deposits. Determination of the natural bitumen’s characteristics is important when choosing methods for their extraction, including detailed information on the geological structure of the reservoir, the properties of the rocks composing the reservoir, and also the control data of the variety of physical and chemical processes during the movement of formation fluids. Improvement of technological processes for the production of bituminous oil is impossible without fundamental knowledge of the features of its rheological properties. Understanding the rheology and structure formation processes relationship in oil dispersed systems makes it possible to purposefully sel ect the reagents for extraction, the parameters of the physical impact on the formation (including thermal methods). Therefore, a complex, systematic approach to assessing the changes occurring in deposits in a wide range of variations in their molecular, fractional, and component composition is essential.
Within the framework of the Federal Targeted Program for Research and Development in Priority Areas of Development of the Russian Scientific and Technological Complex for 2014-2020, Almetyevsk State Oil Institute carries out the work to be performed under agreement 14.607.21.0195 “Research and development solutions to recover from unconventional reservoirs (Domanic) and hard-to-recover crude oil reserves (bitumen) on the basis of experimental studies". Experimental studies are aimed at improving the process of steam gravity drainage and cyclic steam injection in terms of increasing the flow rate, the oil vapor ratio, energy consumption. The paper presents the results of the evaluation of the composition and properties of bituminous oil using rheological, chromatographic and optical studies.
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