Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.50, No.22, 12641-12663, 2011
Integrated Energy Optimization Model for Oil Sands Operations
This article presents a new energy model that Predicts the energy infrastructure required to maintain oil production in the Canadian Oil Sands operation at minimum cast. Previous studies in this area have used on the energy in for fixed energy demands (i.e., the production schemes that produce synthetic crude Oil (SCO) and commercial diluted bitumen remained fixed in the calculation of the optimal infrastructure). The key novelty of this Work is that the model searches simultaneously for the most suitable set of oil production schemes and the corresponding energy infrastructures that satisfy the total production demands under environmental constraints, namely, CO2 emissions targets. The proposed modeling tool was validated using historical data and previous simulations of the Canadian Oil Sands operation in 2003. Likewise, the proposed model was used to study the 2020 Canadian Oil Sands operations wider three different production scenarios. Also, the 2020 case study was used to show the effect of CO2 capture constraints on the oil Production schemes and the energy producers. The results show that the proposed model is a practical tool for determining the Production costs of the Canadian Oil Sands operations, evaluating future production schemes and energy demand scenarios, and identifying the key parameters that affect Canadian Oil Sands operations.