The identical know-how used to seek for indicators of historic life on Mars may very well be the important thing to lowering greenhouse fuel emissions from the Canadian oil sands.
A minimum of that is what members of the Pathways Alliance — an {industry} consortium of this nation’s six largest oil sands corporations — appear to imagine. On Thursday, the group introduced Inconceivable Sensing Vitality, the Calgary-based subsidiary of US area exploration firm Inconceivable Sensing, because the winner in an industry-sponsored international competitors geared toward serving to speed up the large-scale use of steam discount applied sciences in oil sands operations .
The corporate received with a proposal to make use of optical imaging know-how, tailored from its Sherloc system at the moment put in on the Mars Rover, in an oil sands utility.
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Simply as optical imaging can be utilized to seek for faint traces of potential carbon-based previous life on Mars, it may additionally detect exact quantities of carbon-based solvents within the oil manufacturing stream, says Ariel Torre, co-founder and CEO of Inconceivable Sensing Vitality.
He added that area exploration isn’t any completely different from the oil sands, as each function in extraordinarily distant environments below harsh weather conditions. Any know-how used should be extraordinarily delicate, but additionally capable of function basically by itself, with out an operator.
“Lots of the limitations that NASA has are similar to the constraints that oil and fuel have,” Torre stated.
Oil sands corporations at the moment use huge quantities of pure fuel to provide steam for in situ (deep under the floor) oil sands extraction. The steam loosens the viscous bitumen sufficiently in order that it may be pumped to the floor.
Wes Jickling – vp of know-how improvement at COSIA, the innovation arm of Pathways Alliance – stated the {industry} has lengthy identified that solvents, comparable to propane and butane, can act equally to steam in bitumen manufacturing. If solvents may very well be used to switch steam in oil sands manufacturing, the quantity of pure fuel consumed by {industry} would lower dramatically.
“We’re taking a look at a 20 % discount in greenhouse fuel emissions, as much as a 90 % discount in greenhouse fuel emissions in some circumstances, utilizing these solvents. So the potential is big,” stated Jickling.
One other potential benefit is that solvents injected with or as an alternative of steam into oil sands reservoirs can later be recovered from the pumped bitumen and recycled for use once more.
Nevertheless, a report launched final 12 months by the Pembina Inexperienced Vitality Institute stated that utilizing solvents within the oil sands is “promising on paper” however with technical and price limitations.
“The economics of utilizing solvent with steam may be difficult in low crude value cycles when the price of deploying and recovering solvents is increased than the income from the incremental manufacturing,” the report stated.
READ MORE: Oilsands group pledges to spend $16.5 billion on carbon seize mission by 2030
That is why Pathways sponsored the worldwide competitors, Jickling stated — to attempt to discover know-how that may precisely measure, in actual time, the quantity of solvents recovered in oil sands manufacturing. Measuring and figuring out solvents for recycling effectively and affordably, with out deploying workers or stopping manufacturing, generally is a game-changer.
The last word objective is for Inconceivable Sensing Vitality to put in its know-how as a pilot mission at a Pathways Alliance member firm’s oil sands website.
“This entire piece of labor began due to a tricky query we wanted solutions to,” Jickling stated. “This is likely one of the massive science questions we have to remedy to get this (solvent use) out and extensively utilized in {industry}.”
Solvent use is simply one of many applied sciences that the six member corporations of the Pathways Group are exploring as a part of their pledge to scale back their mixed greenhouse fuel emissions from manufacturing by 22 million tonnes by 2030 and to succeed in web zero by 2050.
The important thing plank within the Pathways plan is a proposed carbon seize and storage community in northern Alberta, which might see member corporations make investments $16.5 billion earlier than 2030, however the group additionally plans a further $7.6 billion in spending on different initiatives comparable to vitality effectivity, electrification of engines and extra.
Environmental teams have beforehand criticized Pathways for not shifting quick sufficient on a few of its proposed initiatives, particularly in gentle of final 12 months’s report excessive oil costs.
© 2023 The Canadian Press
