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Canadian researchers have developed a large-scale economical method to extract hydrogen from oilsands (natural bitumen) and oil fields. The process can extract hydrogen from existing oilsands reservoirs, with huge existing supplies found in Canada and Venezuela. Proton Technologies is commercializing the process.
American Sands Energy Corp., an oilsands exploration and development company operating in the state of Utah, announced the successful operation of its oilsand recovery pilot facility. The extraction system consumes no water in its process. —Andrew Rosenfeld, company President.
bp has agreed to sell its 50% interest in the Sunrise oilsands project in Alberta, Canada, to Calgary-based Cenovus Energy, the other owner of the Sunrise project. In Canada, bp will no longer have interests in oilsands production and will shift its focus to future potential offshore growth. 650 water depth.
Researchers at the University of Calgary are developing ultra-dispersed (UD) nanocatalysts for the in situ upgrading of heavy oil and bitumen from deep reservoirs. One of the challenges of such an approach is the placement of the catalyst deep into the heavy oil plume by transporting a catalyst suspension through the sand medium.
CNOOC Limited—China’s largest producer of offshore crude oil and natural gas and one of the largest independent oil and gas exploration and production companies in the world—is acquiring all of the Common Shares of Canada-based energy company Nexen Inc. It is the second-largest oil producer in the UK North Sea.
GE’s wastewater evaporation technologies have been selected to improve wastewater recovery at an existing oilsands project near Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada. To date, 14 SAGD projects have selected GE evaporation technologies, including six over the past 19 months, for their produced water and OTSG blowdown treatment applications.
Proposed oilsands monitoring by 2015. The Government of Canada and Government of Alberta unveiled “The Joint Canada-Alberta Implementation Plan for OilSands Monitoring” in a partnership to improve environmental monitoring in the oilsands region with a program that will sample more sites for more substances more frequently.
Twelve of Canada’s oilsands producers have formed a new alliance, Canada’s OilSands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), focused on accelerating the pace of improving environmental performance in Canada’s oilsands through collaborative action and innovation. The released water is recovered and recycled.
Well-to-wheel (WTW) greenhouse gas emissions for in situ SAGD and surface mining pathways generated employing GHOST/TIAX/ GHGenius combination and comparison with SAGD, mining and conventional crude oil literature pathways (all results are on a HHV basis). 74% of WTW emissions in our oilsands pathways. Click to enlarge.
Bitumen production from the Canadian oilsands provides a point of reference that could be used to observe and better manage the land and water impacts of a rapid transition to unconventional fuels, suggests Dr. Sarah Jordaan of the Energy Technology Innovation Policy Research Group, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University.
The US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has published the Notice of Availability (NOA) of the Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) and Possible Land Use Amendments for Allocation of Oil Shale and Tar Sands Resources on Lands Administered by the BLM in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.
Researchers at the University of Alberta (Canada) have quantified the transformation of the boreal landscape by open-pit oilsands mining in Alberta, Canada to evaluate its effect on carbon storage and sequestration. Oilsands mining and reclamation cause massive loss of peatland and stored carbon. —Rooney et al.
Separation of bitumen from a Canadian oilsand sample using an ionic liquid. A team of researchers at Penn State has developed a new, more environmentally friendly method of separating bitumen from oilsands utilizing ionic liquids (IL). Oilsands represent approximately two-thirds of the world’s estimated oil reserves.
SOLVE adds a solvent to the steam in SAGD (basic operation depicted above) to reduce energy input and water consumption. The production well extracts the bitumen to surface heavy oil production facilities. SAGD is the predominant in-situ recovery method currently used in Canada’s oilsands. Source: StatoilHydro.
A team at Penn State University has demonstrated that a previously developed method employing ionic liquids (ILs) together with a nonpolar solvent such as toluene can effect a separation of bitumen from oilsands in the Western US at ambient temperatures (~25 °C), although with greater difficulty than Canadian oilsands.
The majority (62%) of the plantations were located on the island of Sumatra, and more than two-thirds (69%) of all industrial plantations were developed for oil palm cultivation, with the remainder mostly being Acacia plantations for paper pulp production. —Miettinen et al. Earlier post.).
The Utah Water Quality Board, in a 9-2 vote this week, agreed with the August 2012 recommendations of an administrative law judge (ALJ) upholding a permit-by-rule issued by the Division of Water Quality (DWQ) for the proposed PR Spring an oilsands mine on state land in eastern Utah. Source: USOS, DWQ. Click to enlarge.
Canadian Natural Resources (CNRL), an independent crude oil and natural gas producer, is applying a technique at its Horizon oilsands plant that uses CO 2 to change the water chemistry of the tailings, resulting in accelerated settling and greatly reduced water use.
A study by a team from the State Key Laboratory of Heavy Oil Processing, China University of Petroleum found that fluid thermal processing of. il sands is a feasible process for the production of an upgraded bitumen-derived liquid from Inner Mongolian oilsand. Oilsands exploration in Xing’an region.
Grizzly OilSands ULC has selected GE’s (NYSE: GE) produced water evaporation technology for its Algar Lake project near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Until recently, SAGD produced water could not be recycled as boiler feedwater because conventional treatment technologies were unable to produce the necessary water quality.
A team of two researchers from Natural Resources Canada’s CanmetENERGY reports on a new process for solvent extraction of bitumen from mineable Athabasca oilsands (i.e., The Clark hot water extraction (CHWE) process has been applied in commercial bitumen extraction from the Athabasca oilsands for more than 40 years.
Both scientific research and industrial experience have found that bitumen-derived crude oil (i.e., crude from the oilsands) is no more corrosive in transmission pipelines than other crudes, according to Natural Resources Canada (NRC). In the absence of water, the crude oil is noncorrosive. —ASTM G205.
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar last week announced the Department of the Interior’s final plan for encouraging research, development and demonstration (RD&D) of oil shale and oilsands resources on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Earlier post.).
Alberta’s Innovative Energy Technologies Program (IETP) is supporting 5 new pilot projects to reduce energy use, water use and CO 2 emissions in oilsands processing as well as improving the recovery of crude oil and bitumen in reserves that were once unrecoverable. Imperial Oil Ltd., Imperial Oil Ltd.
Canada’s Environment Minister Peter Kent, and Alberta’s Environment and Sustainable Resource Development Minister Diana McQueen toured several of the new oilsands monitoring stations now in place in the early stages of implementation of the Joint Canada-Alberta Implementation Plan for OilSands Monitoring.
A team from the University of Plymouth (UK) and Environment Canada has identified, for the first time, individual soluble naphthenic acids (NA) in the process water resulting from the oilsands industry in Canada. Frank (2011) Diamonds in the Rough: Identification of Individual Naphthenic Acids in OilSands Process Water.
GE and FilterBox x recently signed an agreement to develop integrated de-oiling and water treatment options for Alberta’s oilsands. Specifically, the two companies will work together on heavy oil produced water treatment projects using in-situ thermal methods such as steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD).
The Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI) released the first comprehensive report on the status of Alberta’s species in the Athabasca OilSands Area (AOSA). It also contains the Athabasca oilsands deposit, which represents 77% of Canada’s proven oil reserves and supports a growing energy extraction sector. “
Summary of the current oilsands developments (mining and in-situ) and associated land use. Canada’s Environment Minister Peter Kent released an integrated monitoring plan for the oilsands region. fail in its goal of generating the data necessary to provide assurance that the oilsands are.
In a paper published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology , Stanford University assistant professor Adam Brandt reviews a number of recent life cycle assessment (LCA) studies calculating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from oilsands extraction, upgrading, and refining pathways—the results of which vary considerably.
In the US, producing one gallon of ethanol from switchgrass consumes approximately the same net amount of water as does producing a gallon of gasoline from conventional crude or oilsandsoil, according to a study by Argonne National Laboratory researchers presented at the 238 th national meeting of the American Chemical Society last week.
Results from a new modeling assessment of contamination in the Athabasca OilSands Region (AOSR) suggest that officially reported emissions of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in that region have been greatly underestimated. Accounting for evaporative emissions (e.g., Average emissions densities from Shen et al.
The Royal Society of Canada (RSC)—the country’s national academy of the arts, humanities and sciences—has released an expert panel report on the environmental and health impacts of the Canadian oilsands industry. Impacts on the regional water supply. Impacts on regional water quality and groundwater quantity.
Osum OilSands Corp. will use water treatment technologies from Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies to process produced water from its Taiga Project at Cold Lake in Alberta. The evaporator system will recover more than 93% of the water from SAGD operations for re-use in the process.
GS Engineering & Construction (GS E&C) has selected GE to supply the produced water evaporation and zero liquid discharge (ZLD) system for the Blackgold OilSands project, located near Conklin, Alberta. Blackgold is owned and operated by a subsidiary of the Korean National Oil Corp.
Researchers from Tianjin University and the National Engineering Research Centre for Distillation Technology, Tianjin, China, report on the use of an ionic liquid (IL) with low viscosity to enhance bitumen recovery from oilsands by solvent extraction while reducing adverse impacts in the ACS journal Energy & Fuels.
Suncor Energy has received conditional approval for its oilsands fluid tailings management plan from Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board ( ERCB ). Tailings are a mixture of fine clay, sands, water and residual bitumen produced through the oilsands extraction process, and are held in massive “ponds”.
the developer of a process for harvesting algae and cleaning up oil & gas water, announced that its second original equipment manufacturer’s (OEM) agreement will target oil service companies in the Canadian oilsands market. LH was an early private investor in Athabasca Oil Corporation. OriginOil, Inc.,
The report provides nine different Tailings Technology Deployment (TDD) Roadmaps to accelerate the implementation of oilsands tailings solutions in Alberta. Water capped end pit lake. Improvement to Water-Based Extraction. sand and clay. sand and clay. Click to enlarge. Earlier post.). Earlier post.).
MCW Energy Group, a Canadian holding company involved in fuel distribution and the creation of oilsands extraction technology, announced successful results of processing random Alberta oilsands tailings ponds samples in a series of preliminary laboratory tests. of bitumen. Sale of hydrocarbons retrieved.
Engineers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering are using membrane distillation technology to enable drillers to filter and reuse the produced water in the oil and gas industry, in agriculture, and other beneficial uses. The team is back in the lab to find a fix. Shamlou, Elmira & Vidic, Radisav & Khanna, Vikas.
Microbiologists from the University of Essex, UK are exploring the use of microbes to break down and remove toxic compounds from heavy crude and oilsands. However, the process of oil extraction and subsequent refining produces high concentrations of toxic byproducts. This water is contained in large settling or tailing ponds.
A study by researchers in Canada and the US shows that oilsands development is a greater source of polycyclic aromatic compound (PAC) contamination to the Athabasca River and its tributaries than previously realized. Bitumen production in the Alberta oilsands has increased rapidly, rising from 482,000 to 1.3
ConocoPhillips announced the second phase of the Surmont project, a Canadian oilsands steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) facility. Surmont is located approximately 63 kilometers (39 miles) southeast of Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the Athabasca oilsands region. John Carrig, president and COO, ConocoPhillips.
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