Smart Automation for Bitumen Extraction and Oil Refining Processes

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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.