Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage Plant-wide Simulation Services
Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (“SAGD”) is an oil sands thermal production technology which relies on steam injection to create a steam chamber where heat transfers to the bitumen, reducing its viscosity and allowing this material to flow for production.
Once the water-bitumen mix reaches the surface, a separation train removes the solids and most of the water. Diluents are blended into the mixture to maintain a reasonably low viscosity and allow for oil pumping into a product pipeline. A significant part of the infrastructure in a SAGD plant is dedicated to water treatment. With steam-to-oil ratios in the order of 2-5 barrels water/barrel of oil, the produced water volumes are significant. Produced water is treated for recycling to the steam generation plant. Current technologies allow for recycle rates of around 95%.
Traditionally the industry has relied on simulation tools such as Aspen HYSYS to model the oil separation part of the plant, however the water treatment section is simulated separately since Aspen HYSYS does not provide functionality to adequately track ionic species. Simulation software tools such as OLI are linked to MS Excel spreadsheets to model the water treatment sections of the plant and engineers have to iterate between various software tools to evaluate design or operating scenarios.
Process Ecology has the capabilities to develop an integrated simulation environment that accounts for the complete SAGD process in the Aspen HYSYS platform.