ANTARES application for cogeneration: oil recovery from bitumen and upgrading

Full text of publication follows: High Temperature Reactors have raised a lot of interest in the past few years because of their specific passive safety characteristics and their potential for high energy conversion efficiency. While most works emphasize the electricity production, HTRs have unique and broad range capabilities in process heat production. Recent interest for their very high temperature capabilities emphasize their use for hydrogen production through advanced high temperature processes, whether electrolytic or chemical. These are in the development stage for long term availability. Meanwhile, HTRs are quite capable to bring highly efficient cogeneration processes to fruition in a short term for low and medium temperature needs. ANTARES, the AREVA HTR development program, is based on an 850 deg. C nuclear heat source linked to a combined cycle power conversion system which brings high efficiency, over 46 %, in its electricity production version without any major new development except an Intermediate Heat exchanger (IHX)[1]. Description of the actual work A particular feature of this design is to be readily adaptable to low and medium process heat delivery, up to 550 deg. C, while still producing a significant amount of electricity. This design is therefore particularly amenable to cogeneration of process heat and electricity. The present paper describes industrial heat delivered at 100 Bar and 310 deg. C together with electricity. Such process heat production is typical of the needs for bitumen recovery from oil sands using the SAGD process. In order to optimize the process, heat must be removed from the cycle at the best location. The computer program THERMOPTIM, developed at the Ecole des Mines de Paris [2], has been designed specifically for that purpose and has been used to calculate the new performance and to help locate the process heat extraction points. Results With such optimization, up to 80% of the nuclear heat is converted into useful energy, either electricity or process heat. Applied in the oil extraction and upgrading context, ANTARES avoids about 14000 tons per day of CO2 release for a 100000 bpd capacity while being competitive with the use of natural gas before CO2 tax application. References: 1. M. Lecomte et al.: 'The Framatome-ANP Near Term HTR Concept and its longer Term Development Perspectives', ICONE 2005, Beijing. 2. J. Gosset et al.: 'Optimization of nuclear HTR thermodynamic cycles with Thermoptim' Submitted to: International Journal of Thermal Sciences. (authors)