Sustainable development:

[HELPNEEDED]

For those of you who work in the patch or not what are your thoughts on sustainable development?

What would you implement within this regard?

Is it even possible?

[trumpethead]

Are we allowed to answer if we dont work in the patch?

[HELPNEEDED]

Originally Posted by trumpethead

Are we allowed to answer if we dont work in the patch?

of course, I will edit that right away. Please accept my apologies.

[GP_Matt]

Something that is becoming more common is low impact pipelines. Companies are changing the way they build to reduce the footprint. Things like changing the way a right of way is stripped to reduce erosion, digging a narrower ditchline to reduce both root damage and ROW width and changing construction methods to reduce the area cleared.
As an example, I recently worked on a 10 km 12" pipeline. Traditionally the right of way would be 20 m wide in cross country sections and 15 m when following an existing pipe corridor. Totaling about 17 hectares of cleared forest. We were instead able to apply for an area that was under 10 hectares.

This is just one example of a change that is a benefit to both the company and the environment and it is happening every day at all levels of the oil patch.

[Fozzie_DeBear]

Alberta's economy is built around resource extraction, refining and marketing. I'm not really convinced that it can ever be truly 'sustainable' (whatever that means).

But, we can try and if we get good at extracting these resources as responsibly as possible, we will have some great technologies to export.

[moncton golden flames]

no matter how you slice it, you can't sustainably develop non sustainable resources, all you can do is try to minimize it's impact.

[HELPNEEDED]

Thank you for the input guys!

[WCan_Kid]

Originally Posted by Fozzie_DeBear

Alberta's economy is built around resource extraction, refining and marketing. I'm not really convinced that it can ever be truly 'sustainable' (whatever that means).

But, we can try and if we get good at extracting these resources as responsibly as possible, we will have some great technologies to export.

Yep, never going to be perfect. A big part of my job is figuring out how to reduce energy consumption during production. It's a small piece of the puzzle, but I figure every little bit helps.

Utilizing solar power, automation, drilling better wells, designing improved lift systems. A lot of time and money goes into trying to reduce the impact, but at the end of the day peoples mindsets towards energy consumption have to change if we're going to move towards true sustainability.

[SeeGeeWhy]

I just submitted a paper to the world heavy oil congress on how to better utilize nuclear fission for steam generation for thermal oil production.

In the scheme we are proposing, heat is generated by a fission reaction in the thermal neutron spectrum (Th -> U) and captured by melting Fluoride salts. The liquid salt is then heat exchanged with water to generate steam. This is essentially GHG free steam production for SAGD... and eliminating GHG emissions from SAGD production would make the practice far more "sustainable" by cutting a huge impact to the surrounding environment.

This reactor uses so little uranium over its life that the costs for raw fuel, enrichment, processing and waste handling are an order of magnitude less than what you would spend to burn natural gas and pay the carbon compliance costs. The difference in these costs is so large that we estimate that the heat requirements for a standard 30,000 bbl/d SAGD project would be paid for when natural gas prices are between $1.09 - 2.32/mcf (so... at today's prices).

Because this is Alberta and gas is so important to the economy, we thought of how to still use the gas volumes we've effectively offset in this scenario. We figure the best use is to "consume" the natural gas and use excess heat from the reactor to produce hydrogen for upgrading the bitumen. This would reduce the need to ship SCO and/or gas condensates to site (reducing pipelining and energy requirements for producing/moving/processing these fluids).

The heat can also be used for other processes such as water treatment and producing low pressure utility steam. This would offset electricity consumption, and in Alberta that is a good thing because our grid electricity has a fairly high carbon emission intensity associated with it.

Other things I've done to minimize environmental footprint on SAGD projects include:

- Reducing pipeline and access road ROW (as described above)
- Choosing water treatment technologies that maximize produced water recycle rates
- Designing access to avoid ungulate mating areas and increasing the height of pipeline racks to allow for animals to cross under (taking advantage of natural variations in the topography to do so)
- Designing wellpads to have a minimum disturbance on surface and gather as many wellpairs as possible
- Choosing water treatment/steam generation technologies that can accept feedwater with a higher salinity (avoiding the need to draw from surface or near surface "fresh" water sources)
- Proposing aquifer storage and recharge for near surface fresh water aquifers when using these volumes cannot be avoided
- Using source water test volumes for construction and drilling volumes
- Recycling drilling mud
- designing comprehensive groundwater monitoring schemes to observe changes in environmental markers
- surveying environments with development potential for sensitive/rare plant and animal life and avoiding areas which contain either
- burying source water wellheads to avoid using heating during cold winter months
- cross exchanging hot produced fluids with various processes to minimize the amount of gas that needs to be burned to provide process heat
- heat tracing waste heat sources with glycol to recover waste heat to be used in other processes
- designing facilities to be as modular as possible to centralize production and maximize construction efficiency
- site specific management of drilling/construction camp waste

And so on, there are lots of interesting environmental initiatives in the oil patch.

To me the concept of sustainability can be extended even further beyond environmental footprint. What does this word actually mean? How can you design a business to succeed and be productive on an ongoing basis in a variety of business conditions? How can you link your project with other companies/initiatives/projects in order to convert waste from another into a useful input for yours, and have waste from your project become a useful and valuable input for another company, human social construct, or natural process? How can you be continually improving what you do and how you do it? There are literally a hundred questions you can ask along these lines to challenge the way one thinks and operates in this world in order to become "more sustainable".

To me, this all comes down to extending value and prosperity up and down the value chain in your industry and by critically examining where you can take something that was once thought of as a linear process (open system... clear begining and end), and re-designing it to become a closed system. To me, that is the ultimate goal of sustainability and a principle I maintain in all of my engineering and business efforts. The truth is, the more "sustainable" your business is, the more efficient (read, profitable)your operation will be, and you can count on it being that way for as long as possible, under as many conditions as possible. Why is this not the goal of every business?

[GP_Matt]

Something that I have heard discussed a few times is to convert drilling rigs and heavy equipment to natural gas.

A lot of money and effort is spent hauling diesel to the site and it might be cheaper and cleaner to use locally sourced natural gas. (I don't actually know what would be required for the local plants to be turned into filling stations but have been told that it could be feasible)

[Schultzie]

Sustainable development is an oxymoron.

[burn_this_city]

Nuclear has it's limitations, from what I understand there is a maximum distance (15km) you can send steam down a pipeline before it condenses.

[SeeGeeWhy]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

Nuclear has it's limitations, from what I understand there is a maximum distance (15km) you can send steam down a pipeline before it condenses.

You're correct in that statement, but also incomplete in the scope.

That is for existing conventional CANDU reactors, who generate steam at around 4.7MPa. This will certainly limit the distance you can pipe the steam and still have it be useful for injection for SAGD as most schemes need pressure at the pad edge anywhere from 3 - 6 MPa with a high enough vapour content (steam quality).. and as there is no such thing as lossless distribution, that outlet pressure on the CANDU is just too low to fit the bill. The advanced CANDU designs can generate at around 6MPa, but that's still not great. On top of that, the reactor sizes and capital requirements are so large that you'd need to be supplying steam to a very sizable SAGD project (in excess of 100,000 bbl/d) to be economic. No company can be that confident in the reservoir performance at the beginning of a project. So the combination of reactor size, reservoir uncertainty and marginal steam conditions makes existing nuclear not a great fit with SAGD. If we ever had a successful low pressure SAGD scheme... then maybe but distribution is still an issue.

Here's a great paper with the details that point to the same conclusion you allude to:

http://web.mit.edu/finana/Public/oil...WhitePaper.pdf

In contrast, the molten salt reactor operates at higher temepratures than a CANDU reactor. With an MSR you can generate supercritical steam at the outlet of the steam supply system (12 - 25MPa). That really helps in breaking through that distribution problem, and even opens the door to possibly accelerating production by bringing on pads that are further out in the field earlier than you normally would. I haven't been able to assess that yet, but intuitively I think it makes sense. The low cost of steam would also allow the operator to enjoy a higher economic cut-off for steaming on a field wide basis which would allow the project to have higher ultimate recoveries or even "greenfield" a reservoir that might have been considered marginal under conventional means.

[SeeGeeWhy]

Here is an awesome video on TED that really helped shaped my view of what sustainable design is and/or should be.

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_paw...hitecture.html

Start around 4:00 to head to the point where he discusses converting from linear to closed loop systems in particular.

[burn_this_city]

What is a rough cost on a molten salt reactor? Has it been proven as commercially feasible or is it still in the lab?

[SeeGeeWhy]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

What is a rough cost on a molten salt reactor? Has it been proven as commercially feasible or is it still in the lab?

Best estimates at this point are in the range of 455 - 910 $/kW(th). For a typical SAGD project phase of 30kbbl/d you'd need about 375 MW(th) to generate the steam during peak production, so in the range of $170 - $340 million per phase. You'd take away the costs to construct and install the traditional steam generation units (OTSGs, Evap/Drum boiler, HRSGs, whatever the alternative would be), but you'd still need to treat produced water. Of course we're efforting to go through more detailed design and engineering for a more accurate estimate but this is a good approximation. Again, the fuel savings is what pays for this capex increase over the base case. It is a relatively quick payout and the other interesting point is that it could conceivably be converted to strict electricity generation once the bitumen has been recovered and the infield facilities like pads, pipelines and roads get reclaimed.

There was a pilot reactor with 8 MWth output that ran from 1960-65 in Tennessee (Oak Ridge National Labs MSRE if you're interested). Other than that, there are a number of programs around the world that are investigating a variety of design configurations but none are commercial at this point and most are being designed to supply base load electricity for large urban centres on the scale of 1 GWe per plant as opposed to the small modular concept that is optimized for process heat that our team is developing.

The closest comparison was the pebble bed modular reactor being developed out of south africa. A great design, but many R&D challenges. It also might fit alright with SAGD but the reactor dimensions are much more restrictive and you'd have to build on site as opposed to off-site + hauling modules.