Advanced control of steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) process

尽管对可再生能源和绿色能源的推动与日俱增，但石油等化石燃料的需求仍然很高，并有上升趋势。此外，在所有化石燃料中，随着各国寻求无煤，对石油的需求正在增加。然而，随着石油需求的增加，加上一些世界经济体的高通胀，生产石油的成本也大幅上升。这种生产成本的飙升，再加上常规储量的缓慢枯竭以及勘探和生产技术的进步，导致了非常规开采技术的诞生，包括蒸汽辅助重力排水(SAGD)。蒸汽辅助重力排水(SAGD)是主要的热采工艺之一，用于从加拿大西部油砂中提取1.7万亿桶重油和超稠油(沥青)中的大部分。它包括通过上注水井向油砂储层注入过热的约80%饱和蒸汽，以调动高粘性沥青。目前通过人工操作注汽压力或速度和流体产量来提高生产率的商业技术已被证明是次优的，采收率在25%至50%之间。通过比例积分导数(PID)控制和模型预测控制(MPC)等更先进的方法实现注汽过程的自动化，已被证明是对开环注汽采油方法的改进，因此，本研究方案的主要重点是开发一种新的控制方案，以可靠而无监督的方式根据当地地质和生产因素自适应调整蒸汽输送和产量，从而实现多井对井垫的管理和产量最大化。因此，将今天的“被动”储油井转变为一个“智能和主动”的储油井，确保以最小的蒸汽使用量最大限度地回收沥青。工业合作伙伴斯巴达控制有限公司是加拿大西部过程工业(包括油砂)公认的过程控制、测量和自动化解决方案的领先供应商。他们的兴趣是通过这次合作应用开发的先进控制策略，以改善短期和长期生产，最大限度地减少蒸汽消耗，从而减少对环境的影响。

Although the push for renewable energy and green energy is growing by the day, the demand for fossil fuels, such as petroleum, is still very high and has an upward trending forecast. Furthermore, of all the fossil fuels, the demand for petroleum is increasing as countries look to be coal free. However, with increase in the demand for petroleum coupled with high inflation in several world economies, the cost of producing it has also gone up significantly. This surge in production cost, coupled with slowly depleting conventional reserves and advancement in exploration and production technology have led to the birth of unconventional recovery technique, including steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD). Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) is one of the major thermal recovery processes used to extract the majority of the 1.7 trillion barrels of heavy and extra heavy oil (bitumen) from the oil sands of Western Canada. It involves, injecting superheated and around 80% saturated steam into the oil sands reservoir through an upper injection well to mobilize the highly viscous bitumen. Current commercial techniques to improve productivity by manual manipulation of steam injection pressure or rate and production rate of fluids have proved to be suboptimal, with recovery rates between 25 and 50%. Recent research on automating the process via Proportional-Integral Derivative (PID) control and more advanced methods like Model Predictive Control (MPC) , have proven to be an improvement over open loop methods of steam injection for oil recovery.Thus, the main focus of this research proposal is to develop a novel control scheme to manage a well pad with multiple well pairs and maximize production by adaptively adjusting steam delivery and production rate based on local geological and production factors in a reliable yet unsupervised manner. Thereby, transforming today's "passive" reservoir well into a "smart and proactive" one, ensuring maximum bitumen recovery with minimum usage of steam. The industrial partner, Spartan Controls Ltd. is the recognized leading provider of process control, measurement and automation solutions in the process industries in Western Canada, including oils sands. Their interest is to apply the developed advanced control strategies through this collaboration to improve short-term and long-term production, minimize steam consumption and consequently reduce environmental impact.