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Originally Posted by shermanator
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I remember reading about NSolv and it's process as early as 2005. Glad to see they finally got meaningful production.
The technical knock on using solvents is 2-fold:
1. How do you control the floodfront?
2. How can you be assured that you recover the solvent on the production side?
I'd love to see the pilot results and how they managed to control the front, and what evidence they have that they recovered the propane at the production well. I have to admit I actually know nothing about the injector-producer pattern or the well types used on their pilot. If all they were doing was flowing propane between a horizontal well pair, I don't think it would have done much to answer those questions.
The risk with a project like this is that a company is not guaranteed to have a favourable balance between the cost of propane and the value of their production. As it's been discussed at length, Alberta's oil sands products are not very valuable. Putting this process on the front end doesn't eliminate the steam requirements, just reduces them. So you still have to build the water treating and steam generation modules. Plus whatever is required for the solvent injection and recovery.
Frankly I see this entire concept as one big gamble that burning gas will become prohibitively expensive, and that somehow at the same time buying propane will stay inexpensive. Adding a bunch of kit without eliminating anything else or improving recovery factors, production acceleration, etc... doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
Even IF all of the conditions stay favourable... it only extends the runway a short bit: "NSolv estimates it can add an aditional 800kbbl/d of production under the 100Mt hard cap".
Let's talk about that hard cap. That hard cap only applies to certain major emtting activities - mining, upgrading, in-situ. We currently sit at 70 Mt, so we have 30 left in the budget before... (what happens if we exceed this, no one is clear - presumably new projects don't get approved until old ones go offline?).
Fort Hills mine will take some of that 30 Mt budget, mines roughly produce 0.045 Mt/bbl produced. In-Situ represents most of the growth projects proposed in the province, and it emits at 0.07 Mt/bbl produced. Let's just pretend all 30 is available for SAGD expansion, that means about 1.17 million barrels/day of capacity can be added, best case. The last two pipelines that got approved basically puts us over that limit.
Most projections show AB will be capped at roughly 3.9 million barrels/day total production under the carbon budget; most projections also show that under the low price scenario we are in today production will be limited to 3.5 million barrels a day anyways.
So NSolv might add 20% to our total production capacity while still being up against the threshold of the hard cap. No guarantees that it actually brings in more money to the province, or if it allows expansion under the low price environment we are facing today. I notice that article didn't touch much on economics, but heavily promoted it's half measure carbon abatement results.
I also notice that much of the ERA (formerly CCEMC) funds have been going to concepts that capture carbon emissions and convert them into synfuels. Synfuel production, even though it is taking carbon from the atmosphere, it is a net contributor as usually part of the feedstock is combusted to produce the heat and power required to run the reactions.
So where do those great, exportable technologies fit under the hard cap?
Are we actually getting anywhere?
...
People might be excited to learn that my company TEI is getting closer to pilot demonstration. We have 5 sites (2 in Canada, 0 in Alberta...) competing to host our demo plant.
Using our reactor to produce steam, electricity, and hydrogen... would render the 100Mt hardcap entirely irrelevant, and it would make those synfuel processes have roughly 30% of the emissions they would normally have (they usually burn gas to power their reactions).
Personally, I think that makes a great fit and opens a lot of potential collaboration between multiple provinces. We need more projects that can allow Canada to emerge as an energy exporting powerhouse as a NATION as opposed to all this Province-centric "Whats in it for me" discourse that's happening today. It's screwing all of us over at a time when Canada could be taking major advantage of the geopolitical and economic opportunities available worldwide. This window isn't guaranteed to last forever.
