A Review of Steam Generation for In- Situ Oil Sands Projects

Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD), an unconventional enhanced oil recovery process for the oil sands, is getting more attention recently as the international oil price increases rapidly. Basic concept of SAGD is to extract the viscosity-lowered bitumen by high pressure, high temperature 100% quality steam injected into the reservoir containing high-viscosity bitumen. As its name implies, generation of highquality, high-temperature and high-pressure steam is a prerequisite for the SAGD process. Hence in this paper, key aspects of steam generation system for oil sands recovery will be broadly reviewed to provide the engineers concerned with the working principles and the major issues such as configuration, design, control of steam generation system used for oil sands recovery.