"ET's" Efforts to Cheaply Unlock Canadian Tar Gunk

Canadian tar crap is bad, but we'll likely be using the sludge for a long time... regrettably. Hurry up, eggheads - 100% solar efficiency NOW!!

The good news is a lot of research is being conducted to make tar sand extraction and processing, cheaper, more environmentally friendly, less energy-intensive and more efficient. I've done posts on this before (here, here and here); now I have some information on ET Energy's Electro-Thermal Dynamic Stripping Process (ET-DSP), a new and innovative process that could conjure far more tar sands, do so more cheaply, and do it all with lower energy and environmental price tags.

Here's the article. It's long, so I blockquoted the best parts. The rest of the article really isn't worth reading. You can also go the company's website and learn more about ET-DSP here.

Ever since oil began its long dive last summer, a torrent of callers has been ringing Bruce McGee's phone. Every time he answers, he tells investors, energy companies and whoever else who will listen this story: He believes his company, E-T Energy Ltd., can produce oil at a profit with prices at $26 a barrel.

Mr. McGee, who is president, believes that changes everything. By his calculation, E-T's technology can be used to pump out 600 billion barrels of oil sands bitumen. That's more than triple the Alberta government's best guess at what's currently recoverable from the oil sands, and enough to satisfy total global demand for two years.

[...]

"If the price of oil stays at $40 a barrel, it will replace mining," predicts Craig McDonald, E-T's vice-president of operations. In coming weeks, the company will hit the road to raise $150-million to commercialize its technology.

That technology isn't much to look at — just a few well heads and large tanks sitting on a windswept field south of Fort McMurray. A series of electrodes dangle in each well. When they are turned on, they pass a current through the earth — like electricity through a stove element — and heat it up. The result: The bitumen, which is normally locked in sand as hard as rock, begins to flow — like molasses in a microwave. No huge mines needed, no greenhouse gas-spewing steam projects required.

In a place accustomed to prying bitumen from the earth using monstrous shovels and vast quantities of steam, this pilot project is a bold attempt to reshape the environmental and financial costs of the oil sands.

- Brewskie

More Canadian Tar Goo Research

(Hat tip: Next Big Future)

This piece is about Excelsior's Energy Limited experimental situ combustion bitumen-recovery process called, "Combustion Overhead Gravity Drainage."

Excelsior has developed the COGD process in cooperation with Hot-Tec Energy Inc., a private company affiliated with members of the In-situ Combustion Research Group from the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary. The In-situ Combustion Research Group is a global leader in the application of in situ combustion recovery processes.

The company said it expects that the application of the COGD recovery process could result in significantly improved bitumen economics through both enhanced recovery gains and substantial reductions in the amount of required water, fuel gas and diluent.

As a result, the company will be focussing its resources towards an experimental in situ COGD pilot project. A project application will be submitted in the second quarter of 2009 with anticipated regulatory approval in approximately one year for the subsequent implementation and commissioning of the pilot in the first quarter of 2011.

[...]

The COGD process is expected to bring a significant reduction in water usage for steam generation by up to 80% compared to a similar sized SAGD process. It is expected to yield a significant reduction in fuel gas consumption for steam generation by up to 80% compared to a similar sized SAGD process, as COGD uses the in situ energy of the bitumen which would otherwise be unrecoverable.

It also involves a reduction in diluent demand as a result of potential in situ bitumen upgrading and a reduced environmental impact through decreased water draw and water recycling, decreased fuel gas and diluent demand.

All of these should significantly improve project economics as COGD recoveries are estimated to be as much as 50% greater than SAGD recoveries, and capital and operating costs are estimated to be considerably lower than comparable SAGD projects.

COGD employs an array of vertical air injector ignition wells above a horizontal production well located at the base of the bitumen pay zone. A short initial period of steaming prepares the cold bitumen for ignition and develops enhanced bitumen mobility in the reservoir. Upon ignition a combustion chamber develops above and along the length of the horizontal well with combustion gases segregated in the upper part of the reservoir and hot bitumen flowing by gravity into the horizontal production well.

- Brewskie

Using Nuclear Power (Errr... Thermal Batteries;)) to Bake Tar Sands

It's called "Mordor of the North:" a vast environmental holocaust larger than Florida, stripped of forests, scarred from mining, with polluted "seas" that place Down Chemical high on Patrick Moore's best environmental stewards list. But since we're too lazy to got back to 19th century farming, and with renewals still out of reach for a bit, we regrettably have no choice but to rely on the blood of the earth - even if... sometimes, and tragically, that mean literally beating that blood out of Mother Nature's face.

Vast amounts of natural gas are required during tar sands' separation process, where water is superheated into steam to separate the bitum; egg heads grind gears day and night researching improved/alternative methods to reduce costs.

Hyperion has floated this idea: use a hot-tub sized nuclear generator, placed underground, to power the process to sip oil out of tar sands, displacing the need to transport and burn natural gas.

Excerpt found below:

Yeah, it’s an unusual target market — and Hyperion is an unusual company. Hyperion claims that those mining an average oil field could save as much as $2 billion a year if they used the company’s technology instead of natural gas to power the process. Oil fields are also remote locations, where the costs of transporting fuel for power cut into the bottom line.

Tar sands developers, like the military, which Hyperion is also targeting, could also be, for lack of a better word, less squeamish about controversial forms of power — the industry is already routinely the target of attack by environmentalists.

But Hyperion also appears to be trying to distance its marketing from the “nuclear” elephant in the room. The term nuclear does not appear once on its latest news release — surprising, given it’s the crux of the technology. Instead it’s using terms like “thermal battery,” explaining the module as one that utilizes the “energy of low-enriched uranium fuel.” We figure anyone who’s going to plunk down $25 million for the device would figure it out.

Deliveries are expected to hit 2014, pushed back from 2013.

Some will undoubtedly find this controversial, but Canadian tar sand extraction and processing is already controversial enough. Wouldn't we rather use nuclear power - which commits no greenhouse emissions, and has plenty of uranium at disposal (this is Canada) - for tar sand processing over natural gas, which does contribute CO2 emissions and is in finite (though ludicrous) quantities? Smell the air of "Modor of the North," wither your lungs like Golem, decide for yourself.

- Brewskie

New Syngas Method for Lower Tar Sand Production Costs

Canada holds vast hydrocarbon potential, but getting it isn't cheap. Oil companies are pouring fortunes into research in effort to lower production costs from roughly $10 a barrel. Some analysts believe it could potentially fall to $3 a barrel (Ghawar Guzzler cannot officiate this for now).

Nexen Inc. and OPTI has a promising new technique. Rather than piping in vast amounts of natural gas to heat water into steam - thus adding to the cost - a partial offset is created by using syngas, processed from the tar sands itself is used.

The Calgary Herald reports:

Nexen Inc. and OPTI Canada’s $6.1-billion technological gamble appears to be paying off as first production of sweet synthetic crude flowed from the partners’ Long Lake oilsands facility this week.

After more than a year in delays, the innovative thermal bitumen operation and upgrading unit ran as planned, on synthetic gas processed from the heaviest bits of the tar-like substance. Full production of 60,000 barrels per day isn’t expected for another year to 18 months, but analysts called the 24-hour run an important catalyst for the project.

[...]

Thermal oilsands projects use a massive amount of natural gas to generate steam, which is piped into the earth to soften up bitumen and enable it to flow through secondary wells back up to the surface.

The technology being pioneered at Long Lake would reduce the need to buy the fuel by running somewhat of a closed loop system.

Briefly, bitumen is steamed out of the earth, then processed to separate out the sand and water, as other steam assisted gravity drainage projects, then the water gets recycled back into steam.

Where Long Lake gets interesting is that the diluted bitumen then gets partially upgraded, and those products get further upgraded through a hydrocracker into light synthetic crude with low sulphur content, with the asphalt-like bits turned into synthetic gas. The gas is subsequently burned to produce the steam to produce the bitumen, and as a source of hydrogen for the hydrocracker that produces the synthetic crude.


- Brewskie

Cleaning Canadian Tar Sand Water

(Editor's note: What a busy week! There's hardly been time to post anything, much-the-less studying up on energy.)

Canadian tar sand production is a dirty, nasty business. It's relatively common knowledge that Canadian tar sands must be mined; vast amounts of water, super-heated by nat. gas, is necessary to separate the bitumen from the sand. This in effect leaves behind highly polluted, toxic man-made lakes where the polluted water is stored.

CNFO offers a solution to this. It's press release states: "it has been engaged by Premere Resources Corporation to develop a new application of its desalination technology to clean waste water from heavy oil and tar sands processing."

More from the press release states:

Large amounts of brine water are created in the processing of heavy oil. CNFO will adapt its desalination process to clean this waste water so that it may be reused instead of discarded as an environmental waste product.

Forty percent of Canada's oil production is from tar sands. The large amount of salt water produced in this process has become an increasing threat to the environment. CNFO's technology will address this threat by separating the clean water from the pollutants so that the fresh water can be reused. This will reduce the amount of water consumed in production and the amount of environmental waste produced by the process. There is more oil stored in tar sands than in all conventional reserves combined. Production of oil from tar sands is expected to increase significantly in the next several years.

This still doesn't dilute the fact that, because of the vast mining operation, the land suffers terrible scars as a result. One can even see the mining's effect from lower orbit in space. However, we are forced to rely on hydrocarbons for the moment to power our lifestyle - nobody, save for boondoggled hermits, wishes to embrace a 19nth century or Mad Max lifestyle. The unpardonable environmental sins, though, should give us extra incentive to move onto the sustainable 21st century lifestyle, and make hydrocarbons obsolete.

Let's move; chop-chop!

- Brewskie

- Brewskie