Detailed investigations of the influence of catalyst packing porosity on the performance of THAI-CAPRI process for in situ catalytic upgrading of heavy oil and bitumen
Authors: Ado Muhammad Rabiu 
Published: October 2021

Heavy oils and bitumen are indispensable resources for a turbulent-free transition to a decarbonized global energy and economic system. This is because according to the analysis of the International Energy Agency’s 2020 estimates, the world requires up to 770 billion barrels of oil from now to year 2040. However, BP’s 2020 statistical review of world energy has shown that the global total reserves of the cheap-to-produce conventional oil are roughly only 520.2 billion barrels. This implies that the huge reserves of the practically unexploited difficult-and-costly-to-upgrade-and-produce heavy oils and bitumen must be immediately developed using advanced upgrading and extraction technologies which have greener credentials. Furthermore, in accordance with climate change mitigation strategies and to efficiently develop the heavy oils and bitumen resources, producers would like to maximize their upgrading within the reservoirs by using energy-efficient and environmentally friendly technologies such as the yet-to-be-fully-understood THAI-CAPRI process. The THAI-CAPRI process uses in situ combustion and in situ catalytic reactions to produce high-quality oil from heavy oils and bitumen reservoirs. However, prolonging catalyst life and effectiveness and maximizing catalytic reactions are a major challenge in the THAI-CAPRI process. Therefore, in this work, the first ever-detailed investigations of the effects of alumina-supported cobalt oxide–molybdenum oxide (CoMo/γ-Al2O3) catalyst packing porosity on the performance of the THAI-CAPRI process are performed through numerical simulations using CMG STARS. The key findings in this study include: the larger the catalyst packing porosity, the higher the accessible surface area for the mobilized oil to reach the inner coke-uncoated catalysts and thus the higher the API gravity and quality of the produced oil, which clearly indicated that sulphur and nitrogen heteroatoms were catalytically removed and replaced with hydrogen. Over the 290 min of combustion period, slightly more oil (i.e. an additional 0.43% oil originally in place (OOIP)) is recovered in the model which has the higher catalyst packing porosity. In other words, there is a cumulative oil production of 2330 cm3 when the catalyst packing porosity is 56% versus a cumulative oil production of 2300 cm3 in the model whose catalyst packing porosity is 45%. The larger the catalyst packing porosity, the lower the mass and thus cost of the catalyst required per m3 of annular space around the horizontal producer well. The peak temperature and the very small amount of produced oxygen are only marginally affected by the catalyst packing porosity, thereby implying that the extents of the combustion and thermal cracking reactions are respectively the same in both models. Thus, the higher upgrading achieved in the model whose catalyst packing porosity is 56% is purely due to the fact that the extent of the catalytic reactions in the model is larger than those in the model whose catalyst packing porosity is 45%.