Since 2002, the Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) production technique has had a skyrocketing growth in the province of Alberta, increasing production from 31,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2002 up to 577,000 bpd by 2013. SAGD is a highly energy intensive method that consumes large quantities of natural gas and water for the production of steam. Once heavy oils are extracted – via SAGD – they must meet pipeline specifications in order to be commercialized, thus dilution with a higher value hydrocarbon or invest in a long-term upgrading project. One way of optimizing and integrating the extraction and upgrading of heavy oils is proposed with the development of the Dense Hot Fluid Injection (DHFI) process, a catalytic in situ upgrading technology. The process targets the substitution – at least partially – of steam by a high heat capacity fluid carrying to the reservoir heat, dispersed nanocatalyst, and hydrogen in order to generate a more competitive oil sand product. It targets the conversion of the vacuum residue (VR) fraction and generates an upgraded synthetic crude oil (SCO) with no vacuum residue and with pipeline transportable viscosity. In this work a two-dimensional bench scale plant is used for the experimental simulation of production and upgrading of an Athabasca type reservoir via DHFI processing. The arrangement is designed to study the heat distribution and oil production from a system with different permeabilities. VR is injected at different residence times to study its conversion levels, and a postmortem product mapping is performed to the residual oil left in the sand packed media. Results confirmed that important upgrading occurs at 500 psi, 350 °C, and hydrogen injection ratios of 300 sccm H2/cc VR. Under the most severe studied case, products reached API gravities of 16°API from a feedstock of 2.4°API. Extremely light hydrocarbons were found within high permeable areas of the rig, while the thermal distribution of the process confirmed the differences between steam injection, presenting “V” type chambers, and dense fluid injection with elliptical shape distributions.

Athabasca Bitumen upgrading via In Situ Combustion (ISC) and In Situ UpgradingTechnology (ISUT) was studied in the present work, addressing three aspects related to these processes: I. Monitoring techniques specially developed for getting distillation characteristics for products and their fractions, II. How distillation properties depend on process set up experimental conditions, III. Assess the permanent upgrading levels achieved for products from both studied processes. High temperature simulated distillation (HTSD) techniques were conceived for getting analysis turnarounds of 1-2 weeks, instead of month spans required when relying on standard physical distillation methodologies. Developed monitoring procedures guaranteed samples integrity, i.e., volatile fractions (<230ºC, about

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