Viscous oil recovery with steam injection is the most widely used onshore and offshore at present, and the oil-gas-water mixtures extracted by the method has some significant features when compared with the mixtures exploited by common recovery method. The yield, water-cut and temperature of mixtures at the wellhead, change periodically with steam injection. Due to the fluctuation of production, the steady-state simulation, which is common used in the design, cannot depict the characteristics of the process. Therefore, Aspen HYSYS Dynamic tool is selected to build a dynamic model which has a great conformance with actual production. The results show that dynamic simulation with Aspen HYSYS dynamic module, can accurately represent the fluctuation of flowrates, wellhead temperature, component and so forth, and with the dynamic method, the fluctuation of mixtures' temperature can be obtained. It reveals the relationship of the yield, component and wellhead temperature along times, and indicate that the water cut of mixtures reach the lowest point in a period when the mixtures' temperature is at its minimum. The heater loading is reduced by 20.9% by using the dynamic simulation tool at last. By putting the second batch of wells go into operation half cycle ahead of schedule, the design heat loading is reduced by 32.54%.
Process simulation is an analysis tool to calculate material balance and energy balance in petrochemical process and oilfield production, which is based on unit operation and thermodynamic principle. Aspen HYSYS is an excellent process simulation software, which is user- friendly and simple to operate. A new method to dynamically simulate coke deposition process for the delayed coking furnace is developed (Guo et al., 2008). In the design of conventional oil and gas fields, due to the change of production data in full life-cycle is not too fierce, steady-state simulation does a fine job of describing the production process. So, steady-state simulation method is widely used in the research and design of oil and gas field engineering. A processing plant of the Draugen platform by performing an energy and exergy analysis is evaluated (Nguyen et al., 2014). The life performance of an offshore platform by comparing three representative stages of an oil field is analyzed (Nguyen et al., 2014).
