Smart Automation for Bitumen Extraction and Oil Refining Processes

沥青提取和重油精炼操作的独特性质产生了许多技术挑战，这些挑战通常不能使用常规方法来解决。相反，需要最先进的解决方案，而这些解决方案往往来自公司和学术界之间的合作。这促使大学，油砂运营商和炼油厂运营商通过NSERC计划建立合作伙伴关系。在我们过去的NSERC CRD和IRC计划中，来自油砂和炼油行业的核心组织-帝国石油，壳牌加拿大和Syncrude加拿大-希望通过NSERC联盟计划与大学进行合作。为沥青提取和炼油工艺的先进控制奠定科学基础;在工艺系统工程和相关数字化转型领域为行业提供科学领导。实现这些目标的一个关键因素是自动化系统的进步。该提案致力于探索先进的数据分析和机器学习技术，并将其应用于流程工业，可能导致过程控制实践的转变。通过这样一个合作研究伙伴计划，我们将帮助行业识别和消除在采矿、原地回收、沥青提取、升级、精炼和公用事业等各个阶段限制运营效率的因素，并应对降低生产成本和环境影响的挑战。我们的综合计划将与行业合作，将研究成果转化为实施的解决方案，并培养具有良好就业前景的高素质人才。因此，加拿大将更好地满足其未来的能源工业需求。

The unique nature of bitumen extracting and heavy oil refining operations creates a host of technical challenges that generally cannot be resolved using conventional methodologies. Rather, state-of-the-art solutions are required, and these often emerge from the collaboration between companies and academia. This motivates the university, oil sands operators and refinery operators to form a partnership through the NSERC program. Satisfied and impressed by the cutting-edge research in our past NSERC CRD and IRC programs, core organizations from oil sands and refining industries-Imperial Oil, Shell Canada and Syncrude Canada-wish to progress their collaboration with the University through the NSERC Alliance program.The goal of this partnership is three-fold: continue the research from our previous Industrial Research Chair program; establish scientific foundations for advanced control of bitumen extraction and oil refining processes; provide scientific leadership to the industry in the area of process systems engineering and associated digital transformations. A key element to achieving these goals is the advancement of automation systems. This proposal endeavours to explore advanced data analytics and machine learning technologies and apply them to process industries, potentially leading to a transformation of process control practice. Through such a collaborative research partnership program, we will assist the industries in identifying and removing factors that limit operational efficiency in all stages involved in mining, in-situ recovery, bitumen extraction, upgrading, refining and utilities, and meeting the challenges of reducing production cost and environmental impact. Our integrated program will enable collaboration with the industry to convert research outcomes into implemented solutions and train highly qualified personnel with excellent job prospects. As a result, Canada will be better positioned to meet its future energy industry needs.