Abstract
The upstream operations in the oil sands industry comprise numerous interlinked processes with complex physical phenomena. To better understand the same, a high-fidelity dynamic process model, encompassing the major unit operations in bitumen extraction and recovery from oil sands, is developed in the IDEAS simulation platform. This model is validated against a reference plant data, and the relative error is less than 5%. In the validated model, three scenarios are devised to investigate the process variable-response relationship in a simulation environment. These include the effects of ore grade and ablation on bitumen recovery and hydrotransport length on secondary ablation. The predicted recovery of bitumen using low-grade ore is 89.30% and that for high-grade ore is 92.81%. For all the scenarios investigated, the model brings to fore the collective dynamic response of the interacting system of unit operations. Dynamic models such as these can be used as test beds by researchers for further analysis and also by plant personnel as an operational training tool.
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