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This paper proposes a new integrated model for simultaneous design optimization of upgrading plants in the oil sands industry and the associating utility plants. In the past, work has been mainly focused on the energy infrastructure of upgrading plants, and predesigned power and hydrogen plants were considered as utility plants. The novelty of this work is the incorporation of a detailed polygeneration energy system model with the bitumen upgrading plant model. In this way, optimal configurations can be found to meet the various energy requirements of upgrading plants in the oil sands industry. On the basis of the proposed optimization model, optimal configurations under different scenarios are discussed. Effects of upgrading plant capacity, being able to export power to the public grid, natural gas and electricity prices, and the margin between diluted bitumen and synthetic crude oil prices are studied. According to the results, the presented model is a practical tool to design the optimal upgrading plant and its utility plant for the oil sands industry.

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A general framework is proposed for the operation optimization of a bitumen upgrading plant in the oil sands industry. On the basis of simulation results from an upgrading plant in an Aspen HYSYS environment, empirical models are developed through statistical analysis for different process units. Each generated correlation is a function of the relevant process unit operating conditions. All of the correlations are further used to develop the upgrading plant optimization model, which is a non-convex nonlinear optimization (NLP) problem. The proposed model is tested on three examples in which different commodity demands are imposed as constraints: (i) no restriction for production, (ii) sweet synthetic crude oil (SCO) production, and (iii) mandatory multiple production. Results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework for the upgrading plant operation optimization.