Oil sands operators are exploring the use solvents with steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) to help loosen and extract bitumen. Laricina Energy CEO Glen Schmidt likens the technology to a hybrid car.
Laricina Energy CEO Glen Schmidt likens the technology the company is testing to a hybrid car. Laricina is one of several oil sands companies that are exploring the use of solvents with steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) to help loosen and extract the bitumen.
Laricina’s Saleski site and the non-thermal solvent
production test well from the Grosmont
Continuing his automotive metaphor, Schmidt says conventional SAGD – using natural gas to create steam – is like a conventional car that burns gasoline. Oil sands operators that are using electrical currents to heat the bitumen are like plug and play electric cars, and those using a mix of solvents and steam are somewhere in between the two; like a hybrid car.
“Most things are a spectrum” says Schmidt. “From cold solvents – which use no steam to SAGD or thermal which use pure steam – my expectation is the more optimal design may be somewhere in between.”
Laricina has conducted a series of very promising tests with solvents in its Grosmont Formation at Saleski, southwest of Fort McMurray. There are an .estimated 318 billion barrels of bitumen about 300 metres underground in the carbonate rock – not traditional sands – in Alberta’s Grosmont deposit.
“The over all capacity and quality of the bitumen reservoirs within the carbonates are clearly world class,” says Schmidt. “There’s an opportunity to use another tool beyond steam because of their greater ability for oil to flow or drain.”
Using solvents instead of steam could mean reducing the operating steam-to-oil ratios by 30 per cent, with the accompanying reduction in green house gas emissions. Laricina is also looking at using a non-condensable gas along with the solvents to see whether steam can be cut out completely, thereby dramatically reducing capital costs and the carbon footprint at the same time.
“Costs and environmental impacts tend to go together in our industry,” says Neil Edmunds, Laricina’s Vice President Enhanced Oil Recovery, and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering.
Laricina has recently conducted a second field test of solvent injection into the Grosmont carbonates and its work simulating and modeling solvent-steam combinations is continuing. The company expects commercial production at Saleski could begin in 2013 and advance steadily for ten to 15 years; with improved recovery techniques, lower operating costs and fewer carbon emissions.
At its Germain project in the Grand Rapids Formation, Laricina is using solvent-SAGD in a demonstration project of 5,000 barrel of bitumen per day to further validate the solvent process.