As the price of Oil inevitably increases, the market will make new and sidelined technologies more commercially viable. Whether this will provide relatively the same amount of energy as is now consumed remains to be seen. One resource often cited as a safety net is Canada’s tar sands:

Alberta’s black gold isn’t the stuff that geysered up from Jed Clampett’s backyard. It’s more like a mix of Silly Putty and coffee grounds - think of the tar patties that stick to the bottom of your sandals at the beach - and it’s trapped beneath hundreds of feet of clay and rock….It’s a laborious process, to say the least - 2 tons of sand yields just one barrel of oil - but nowhere near as painstaking as it used to be. In the 1920s, Karl Clark, a University of Alberta chemist, discovered that steam could tease pitch out of sand. His breakthrough piqued Big Oil’s interest, but no one could make the process cost-effective.

This week the Canadian government announced that it is investing in a pilot project to test a new technology which promises to lower costs:

The Canadian oil sands are a strategic resource of North American energy. However, current technology for in situ production consumes large volumes of natural gas, fresh water or hydrocarbon solvents, thus providing an opportunity for new technologies to advance and sustain oil sands development.

Petrobank’s project will use a new combustion process that combines a vertical air injection well with a horizontal production well. The THAI™ technology offers a number of advantages over the current steam-assisted gravity drainage system for heavy oil recovery, including higher potential resource recovery (70-80 percent), lower production and capital costs, minimal usage of natural gas and fresh water, the possibility of a partially upgraded crude oil product and significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Link

Related Leave a Comment