Oil Sands
Operational Objectives
Oil sands plants are very costly to build and operate. Shareholders expect an appropriate rate of return on their investment. This expectation requires that a plant meet both quantitative (barrels produced) and qualitative (a bitumen product with few contaminants) production targets. Over time, shareholders will also expect that operator experience gained will result in fewer production upsets which, in turn, will result in greater throughput at lower operating costs.
In addition to these economic goals, there are material, politically dictated production targets that must be taken into account. The Alberta Energy Utility Board (which represents the citizens of Alberta) enforces stringent goals to ensure that the province's resources are well managed. These goals not only encompass specific metrics for bitumen recovery but also lay out environmental policy surrounding the use of water and energy during the production process, and the desired process of site reclamation and tailings pond management.
The main focus of the business, engineering and operations teams at any oil sands plant is to achieve and maintain the production goals as outlined by the corporate owners and provincial stakeholders.
Our experiences to date with four major oil sands operators (CNRL, Albian Sands, and Shell Canada) have revealed the following three major production goals that tie directly to the overarching economic and political goals above:
- optimize bitumen recovery (for quantity and quality)
- minimize energy and water consumption costs
- minimize environmental impact and reclamation costs
The process of achieving these goals in the complex web of physical, political and economic environments that these companies operate within is one of the most daunting and expensive industrial challenges on the planet.
Operational Challenges
When a bitumen extraction circuit fails to achieve its production goals, the underlying root cause will lie in one of the following three areas:
- Mechanical Equipment Failure
- Quality of Ore Feed
- Process Control Strategy
Ore feed quality and process control strategy are very difficult to analyze, understand, and diagnose due to:
- challenging production goals that rely on complex interactions between large numbers of contributing factors
- immature processing procedures in these relatively new industrial operations
- poor communication between mine and plant
- an overwhelming amount of operational data collected from the lab, mine and plant
