Syncrude and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) came together to host a series of tours throughout Alberta’s rich oil production plants, giving the Post an exclusive look behind closed doors and into the world of petroleum production.
“This series of tours is all about transparency,” said Travis Davies, a media manager at CAPP. “We want to give an inside look into the oil sands and try to answer the questions that Albertans want answered.”
The two-day whirlwind of tours began on Thursday morning at Syncrude’s research facility in Edmonton. A tour led by Ph.D candidate Richard Paproski showed off several new technologies that Syncrude is testing to help manage their precious bitumen resource. Syncrude’s primary assets are two major mine properties in Fort McMurray (Mildred Lake and Aurora) that harvest heavy bitumen and refine that product into crude oil.
One of the more interesting pilot projects that Syncrude is working on in their Edmonton lab deals with taking excess coke powder, a byproduct of the bitumen to crude process, and using that as a filter to hopefully one day clean the water in their tailings ponds.
“This was absolutely an accidental discovery, we found that we had all this excess powder made of accelerated carbon,” said Warren Zubot, a research associate at Syncrude. “By running samples of tailings pond water through the coke powder, it ends up acting like a Brita filter for us.”
Cleaning up the tailings pond has become an increasingly important issue for Syncrude after 2010 when the Alberta government released a statement that detailed the demise of 230 ducks that had to be euthanized after coming into contact with the toxic bitumen ponds.
“We know how important the ongoing tailings ponds research is,” said Cheryl Robb, a media relations advisor from Syncrude. “The coke pilot ends in the fall and hopefully we’ll have the results we need to move forward with that and our other water capping plans.”
ONWARDS TO CENOVUS’S INSITU OPERATION
After finishing the tour at the research lab, Cenovus chartered a plane and flew the media representatives to their Christina Lake in-situ project in Conklin.
In-situ, unlike the traditional method of mining heavy crude, uses a combination of water and steam to extract the oil deposits. In-situ works well because 80 per cent of the available oil deposits are too far underground to be reached by mining operations. In-situ projects also do not require the toxic tailings ponds.
“In-situ will be the way of the future, right now mining and in-situ production are nearly 50-50 in production,” Davies said. “But by 2015 in-situ will vastly outpace mining and then it won’t look back.”
A major issue with the current in-situ technology is that at the moment only 70 per cent of the harvested bitumen is good enough to be processed.
“If too much sand gets into the deposit or debris is picked up along the way, it renders that oil useless,” said Jason Abbate the group lead of production engineering at Cenovus.
Cenovus is testing one way that might help optimize their in-situ extracting process, a program called SAP. SAP works by adding a butane injection into the steam.
“Think of that butane as a kind of soap for the sand,” Abbate said. “The steam will only get so much of the sand, but by adding butane we are hoping to optimize our production by an additional 20 per cent.”
After the extracting process, Cenovus sends their crude product to two major oil refineries in Illinois and Texas. There has been much discussion as to why the Alberta government does not look at refineries like the proposed Teedrum refinery, allowing the oil to be processed here instead of sending the majority of it to America and other nations.
“It’s a difficult issue that has many sides to it, there isn’t much of a market for a major refinery in Canada when you have several in the United States and China,” Davies said. “There is also the question of work force, building a refinery like that would require thousands and thousands of jobs, and we just don’t have that kind of availability in Alberta.”
A QUICK FLIGHT TO FORT MCMURRAY
The tours finished with another ride in the small fifteen-seater plane, taking the group to Fort McMurray, and a look at Syncrude’s Mildred Lake mine. Fort McMurray is the only location in Alberta that can mine oil sand, because the bitumen happens to be very close to the surface.
Shovels and trucks take the mined oil sand, which is mixed with warm water to create a slurry, to a pipeline that is pumped to the extraction facilities. After the bitumen is extracted, it goes into one of Syncrude’s three fluid cokers and is blended and transmitted by pipelines to various refineries in North America.
“Right now we produce 290,000 barrels of crude oil per day, and our owner’s expect that we’ll be mining at this site until 2070,” Robb said.
With such a large project and site, Robb estimated that Syncrude has already disturbed 20,000 hectares of land. Although there has been several progressive reclamations, Robb is the first to admit that more effort is being done to further these reclamation sites.
‘We spend over 200 million dollars every year on our reclamation projects, it absolutely a necessary part of the mining project,” she said.
One site in particular, Gatewill Hill, is the first and only reclamation site in Canada that has received the coveted 25-year certificate from the Alberta government as a fully reclaimed site.
“Syncrude is the only company to have an area that has been fully reclaimed,” Davies said.
The area has full grown, mature trees and because it is fully reclaimed, it has since been turned over to the Alberta government to use as a community park.
“It’s amazing, you can’t even tell that this was once a mine pit,” said Niklaus Nuspliger a political correspondent for Neue Zurcher Zeitung a Swiss news publication.
The two-day trip concluded with a drive through Fort McMurray, a city that has seen its population double from 60,000 to 120,000 in less than ten years.
“Fort McMurray is primed for continual growth, the influence of the oil sands is fueling this community,” said Matthew Harrison a press secretary for the Municipality of Wood Buffalo.
