Post by Catdaddy on Nov 30, 2007 15:22:23 GMT -5
Oilsands' footprint hard to measure
Murray Lyons, The StarPhoenix
Published: Friday, November 30, 2007
Let's be clear about one thing as Saskatchewan's odds of getting an oilsands industry improve each day.
An environmental footprint will be left in the early stages, as represented by the Axe Lake project being fast-tracked by Oilsands Quest Inc., north of the remote and largely pristine Clearwater River Provincial Park.
You have to only fly over the exploration site to see every one of the nearly 200 drill pads has created a disturbance in the landscape that will take years for nature to reclaim. The hundreds of kilometres of slash lines used in "shooting" 3D seismic pictures will be visible for years to come.
There will be an expanding environmental footprint as the exploration project moves closer to being a producer of bitumen, requiring a multibillion-dollar investment.
The question that Saskatchewan policy makers have to decide is whether the creation of an oilsands industry can be sustained in a manner comparable in its environmental footprint to some of the province's other resource extraction businesses.
As a point of comparison, the potash industry is usually considered pretty benign. However, refining potash ore does require lots of water. If you look at the big wall map at Gardiner Dam, you will see almost every potash mine in Saskatchewan is connected to the Lake Diefenbaker water storage system, either through a canal or a big pipeline. The point is that potash extraction does have an environmental cost including use of our freshwater resource, but nobody really pays attention to it.
WATER USE REDUCED AT COLD LAKE
In the most recent Imperial Oil Review, an article on water usage in oilsands production notes that up to 60 per cent of the South Saskatchewan River's water flow has been allocated -- whether that's for agriculture, industry or for cities. By contrast, the Athabasca River flowing past Fort McMurray and the major tar sands projects so far has only 3.6 per cent of its total flow allocated, including the amount siphoned off for the oil and gas industry.
Like many of the newer deposits on the Alberta side of the Fort McMurray formation, the Axe Lake bitumen discovery is too deep to extract through open pit methods. It will use "in situ" extraction which uses steam and other solvents, injected from surface, to get the bitumen to become more liquid than solid so it can flow to surface.
In the Review article, Imperial claims its bitumen recovery operation near Cold Lake, which now supplies five per cent of Canada's oil production, has reduced its water usage over the years by 80 per cent. The oil giant originally used 3.5 barrels of fresh water, much drawn from Cold Lake itself, to produce each barrel of bitumen. Now, it's just half a barrel of water to recover each barrel of petroleum and 95 per cent of the water used to make steam is recycled, Imperial says.
On Wednesday following his Saskatoon chamber presentation, Oilsands Quest president Christopher Hopkins fielded an environmental question about water use. He explained he doesn't envision a potential Axe Lake production facility having to draw upon fresh water supplies because there are sources of brackish groundwater that could be cleaned up, used in steam generation and then recycled.
CAN LEARN FROM MISTAKES
The second-largest company to take a land position in Saskatchewan's oilsands territory offers even less total resource consumption in producing bitumen. Petrobank Energy and Resources Ltd. may have the leading method of bitumen extraction in the entire Athabasca region.
Its patented THAI technology (for Toe to Heel Air Injection) has been tested on a small scale at the company's Whitesands project in Alberta. The THAI method essentially sends enough air down into the formation that the petroleum coke material within the bitumen itself can be ignited underground, heating up the rest of the formation in a sweeping motion (moving from toe to heel). The bonus is the bitumen that flows towards the extraction pipe has been partially upgraded by the combustion process occurring underground.
Murray Lyons, The StarPhoenix
Published: Friday, November 30, 2007
Let's be clear about one thing as Saskatchewan's odds of getting an oilsands industry improve each day.
An environmental footprint will be left in the early stages, as represented by the Axe Lake project being fast-tracked by Oilsands Quest Inc., north of the remote and largely pristine Clearwater River Provincial Park.
You have to only fly over the exploration site to see every one of the nearly 200 drill pads has created a disturbance in the landscape that will take years for nature to reclaim. The hundreds of kilometres of slash lines used in "shooting" 3D seismic pictures will be visible for years to come.
There will be an expanding environmental footprint as the exploration project moves closer to being a producer of bitumen, requiring a multibillion-dollar investment.
The question that Saskatchewan policy makers have to decide is whether the creation of an oilsands industry can be sustained in a manner comparable in its environmental footprint to some of the province's other resource extraction businesses.
As a point of comparison, the potash industry is usually considered pretty benign. However, refining potash ore does require lots of water. If you look at the big wall map at Gardiner Dam, you will see almost every potash mine in Saskatchewan is connected to the Lake Diefenbaker water storage system, either through a canal or a big pipeline. The point is that potash extraction does have an environmental cost including use of our freshwater resource, but nobody really pays attention to it.
WATER USE REDUCED AT COLD LAKE
In the most recent Imperial Oil Review, an article on water usage in oilsands production notes that up to 60 per cent of the South Saskatchewan River's water flow has been allocated -- whether that's for agriculture, industry or for cities. By contrast, the Athabasca River flowing past Fort McMurray and the major tar sands projects so far has only 3.6 per cent of its total flow allocated, including the amount siphoned off for the oil and gas industry.
Like many of the newer deposits on the Alberta side of the Fort McMurray formation, the Axe Lake bitumen discovery is too deep to extract through open pit methods. It will use "in situ" extraction which uses steam and other solvents, injected from surface, to get the bitumen to become more liquid than solid so it can flow to surface.
In the Review article, Imperial claims its bitumen recovery operation near Cold Lake, which now supplies five per cent of Canada's oil production, has reduced its water usage over the years by 80 per cent. The oil giant originally used 3.5 barrels of fresh water, much drawn from Cold Lake itself, to produce each barrel of bitumen. Now, it's just half a barrel of water to recover each barrel of petroleum and 95 per cent of the water used to make steam is recycled, Imperial says.
On Wednesday following his Saskatoon chamber presentation, Oilsands Quest president Christopher Hopkins fielded an environmental question about water use. He explained he doesn't envision a potential Axe Lake production facility having to draw upon fresh water supplies because there are sources of brackish groundwater that could be cleaned up, used in steam generation and then recycled.
CAN LEARN FROM MISTAKES
The second-largest company to take a land position in Saskatchewan's oilsands territory offers even less total resource consumption in producing bitumen. Petrobank Energy and Resources Ltd. may have the leading method of bitumen extraction in the entire Athabasca region.
Its patented THAI technology (for Toe to Heel Air Injection) has been tested on a small scale at the company's Whitesands project in Alberta. The THAI method essentially sends enough air down into the formation that the petroleum coke material within the bitumen itself can be ignited underground, heating up the rest of the formation in a sweeping motion (moving from toe to heel). The bonus is the bitumen that flows towards the extraction pipe has been partially upgraded by the combustion process occurring underground.
