New oilsands technology may repair bruised image

By Dave Cooper, Edmonton JournalJanuary 2, 2010Comments (6)

In 2000, Alberta's massive bitumen resource was not well-known internationally as a secure source of oil. It wasn't a target for environmentalists -- protesters chaining themselves to equipment, and oily dead ducks wouldn't be news around the world for many years.

As the century began, the province's oilsands were simply seen as an engineering marvel.

After a decade of virtually no growth, Alberta's oilsands in 2000 were set to explode out of their obscurity -- both above and below ground.

At the turn of the century, Syncrude was just opening its Aurora project, the first satellite mine that feeds the Mildred Lake bitumen up-grader through a 35-kilometre hydro-transport system developed by the firm.

In the huge pits, the now-common 400-tonne Caterpillar monster trucks, the largest ever built, were being tested.

Nearby, Shell was building its Albian Sands mine -- the first new oilsands project since 1978, which was set to join pioneers Suncor and Syncrude on the landscape.

But is was underground that things were really heating up.

Alberta researchers had devised a way to tap the 80 per cent of the bitumen, a tar-like form of petroleum, that is too deep for surface mining.

And in 2000, a group of companies that had participated in the field work were ready to begin $3.4 billion worth of commercial ventures.

All these large underground projects today -- which use a technology known as steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) -- were kicked off at this time, including Suncor's first Firebag project and others at Surmount, Christina Lake, Foster Creek, Primrose, Hangingstone and MacKay River.

"SAGD is a vast step change in technology with no mine, no tailings ponds and no water from the river," said Don Thompson, president of the Fort McMurraybased Oilsands Developers Group. "It has changed the face of the oilsands."

The boom that became evident in 2000 actually began with a national oilsands task force report in 1995, a time when there was no new money going into development.

Former Syncrude president Eric Newell was a key player in the push to "get things going," bringing governments and industry to the table to hash out new royalty and tax terms that spurred massive expansion.

"We were trying to get people excited. The groups developed a vision where we would triple oil production over 25 years at a cost of $25 billion, and we all worked through the numbers and what it would mean to people, such as how many jobs would be created across the country and how much revenue would flow to the governments," said Newell.

By any measure, the vision has come true in spades, with oilsands production now at 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) -- four times its 2000 level and likely to hit two million bpd by 2015.

While scientists, regulators and producers knew the resource was a massive 175 billion barrels of oil trapped in sand -- the world's second-largest deposit after Saudi Arabia -- it was not yet common knowledge.

That changed in 2003 when the influential Oil and Gas Journal in the U.S. determined that the existing technology could now efficiently produce the resource. The oilsands suddenly became America's new reliable source of energy, a popular idea in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and amid a growing dislike of pumping more money into the pockets of Middle East nations.

"That's the date people outside Alberta recognized the vastness of this resource, and when the international attention started," said Greg Stringham, a vice-president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Eddy Isaacs, executive director of the Alberta Energy Research Institute, said when he used to attend international conferences, "the oilsands were seen as a marvel, people were awed by what was happening. In recent years, the oilsands have been seen as an environmental challenge, an environmental bust or environmental disaster. Call it what you want."

And things got nasty at the 2008 World Petroleum Congress in Madrid.

"The negative attention, or black eye, was foisted on the oilsands, I think unfairly," he said.

"We need to focus on environmental and economic sustainability, but the oilsands is so young. After the first 25 years as a teenager it is now a young adult. It takes time to mature."

But some groups say too much environmental damage has already been done, from air and water pollution to clear-cutting great chunks of the boreal forest that lies over the Floridasize resource.

Greenpeace's attention-getting "Stop the Tarsands" campaign aims to halt further projects.

Thompson thinks that just as engineering advances in the 1990s solved production challenges and paved the way for the boom of the past decade, so the work starting to appear today -- advances in areas like water use, emission controls and tailings management -- herald the changes which will alter the face of the oilsands industry over the next decade.

"It should be a positive decade ahead."

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

I just read this article published on Jan. 2,2010 at Calgary Herald. Please note that this is not my article. Calgary herald has the copyright of the article. I am citing it just for reading! If anybody thinks it is not proper to cite the article in this way, please let me know and then I will remove it.

I do not know what the author is trying to say. SAGD technology is there at least more than 10 years(I am not sure how many years exactly), but the article says it is promising new technology!

SAGD water treatment samples

I am posting one picture I took at a SAGD site in 2005 winter. I was using one stage coalescer to treat the SAGD water directly from SAGD HTS. The cleaner water sample in the picture is 20-30 ppm OIW. I do not remember how much ppm the inlet water (dirty one) is. I am not sure if is about 200ppm. The result is not good enough for recycle to boiler.

Not many water process engineers available

Even though produced water treatment is occurring for some years, I feel that it is still new or in developing phase for oilfields. Just due to more and more strict environmental regulations every oilfield is trying to do it but many of them are still struggling it. It seems there are not many engineers mainly working on produced water treatment even though it is a big part of oil production process. Some engineers( but not many) are working in oil sands SAGD fields for water treatment.

I feel that generally we do not have many water process engineers for oil and gas industry. I hope my feeling is wrong. I just hope more and more engineers join this topic, discuss about it and contribute to oil and gas water process.

Future water-treated high quality produced water

In order to dispose of or reinject the produced water within the environmental requirements, the oil in the water has to be removed. Many water deoiling equipment and technologies such as skim tank, IGF, CTour, Epcon-CFU, TORR etc are available in the industry now.

For any water deoiling technology, we have to look at the stability of oil-in-water emulsion (reverse emulsion). Water deoiling is to break the emulsion and to separate the oil from water. The emulsion stability may differ dramatically from different oilfields due to different reservoir characteristics, oil compositions, organics or chemicals used in the productions. It may take from a few minutes to a few months or more to separate oil from water for different emulsion. Oil sands SAGD water has very tight emulsion due to high asphaltene content and process chemicals, which bring challenges for SAGD water treatment.

Produced water

Produced water is the water that is produced with the crude oil when the oil production is occurring. The water content in the oil pumped from the wells varies between different reservoirs, but the quantity is huge (may be up to more than 90 per cent). Because of the huge volume of the produced water, produced water treatment is a big issue for oilfields.

Due to more and more strict environmental regulations, the quality of treated produced water is required to be better and better. Solids in the water is easy to be removed. Organic removal is not popularly required yet even though some oilfields are doing it now. The main target is to remove oil. The content of oil in water(OIW) is required to be from 40 ppm to 5 ppm and even less in different countries and areas.