A project aspiring to grow up into the next oil sands breakthrough includes the ultimate in substitutes for natural gas — pure heat. As oil sands manager and chief financial officer of Petrobank Energy and Resources, Chris Bloomer makes the earth burn. “It’s aggressive in the reservoir,” he said in describing the new production method at an industry conference and trade fair in Fort McMurray, the oil sands boom city 500 miles northeast of the Canadian gas capital of Calgary.

The process barbecues bitumen into flowing as hot black gold, without burning natural gas except for a short warm-up stage prior to the start of production. Cutting gas use has become a major preoccupation in the oil sands, where established mining and thermal production methods are forecast to triple natural gas consumption to 1.8 Bcf/d in a few years unless new and improved techniques are developed.

After years of laboratory trials, Petrobank subsidiary Whitesands Insitu this summer achieved ignition beneath its 160 square kilometers (62 square miles) of oil sands leases near the Metis (mixed-blood, aboriginal and French Canadian) community of Conklin south of Fort McMurray.

Production, generated by an initial pair of wells involved in the first subterranean wall of fire, is scheduled to start reaching oil markets before the end of this month. Petrobank’s next move will be a C$500 million (US$450 million), 50,000 b/d project with 80 wells if all goes according to plan with extended field trials over the next year or two.

The new method — patented and trademarked as THAI, short for toe-to-heel air injection — is serious geology and engineering. It is not just one of numerous science projects or speculative technology enterprises springing up amid mammoth projects forecast to quadruple oil sands output to four million barrels a day in 15 years. The technology is “evolutionary,” Petrobank emphasizes. Canadian backers include Richardson Capital Ltd., a blue-chip private equity investment house, and the federal government.

Richardson holds a 16% interest in Whitesands as a long-range bet that the technology will turn out to be a breakthrough. Ottawa’s Technology Partnerships Canada put C$9 million into the pilot project because it shows promise of making significant reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions compared to orthodox oilsands in-situ or underground production using steam made by gas-fired boilers.

“There’s nothing new here,” Bloomer said. “It’s just a matter of how you apply it.”

Attempts to make tarry bitumen and heavy oil flow by burning parts of the deposits have an industry pedigree dating back to the 1920s. Underground combustion techniques have been tried in India, Romania, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. Results to date have been mixed at best. The magic ingredient that makes the old idea worth trying again is horizontal drilling, which in Canada evolved from experiments in Saskatchewan and northern Alberta a quarter-century ago into a widespread standard practice.

The name of the Petrobank-Whitesands process describes its system. Visualize a bitumen deposit as a foot. A vertical well is drilled into the big toe. A horizontal well runs through the deposit and forms a heel shape where it arcs to the surface.

Gas is used only in a pre-ignition stage, when the vertical well warms up bitumen with steam injections. Then about 3 MMcf/d of air is blasted down with force about 40 times greater than the pressure in a car tire. The artificial tornado ignites the heated bitumen. A combustion front, which works like smoldering charcoal rather than flaming firewood, spreads out into a wall of heat about 100 meters (327 feet) across.

Constant air injections drive the fire front through the geological reservoir gradually along the horizontal well, which is about 500 meters (1,635 feet) long. Perforated steel pipe collects resulting flows of oil heated to simmering but not burning temperature. If all goes according to plan, the heaviest 10% of the bitumen burns. About 80% is cooked into a partially upgraded form, closer to refinery-ready light oil, and flows to the surface.

The underground barbecue leaves behind clean, dry sand formations. There is no danger of the land surface slumping like cave-ins at old coal mines because the process does not change the fabric of the earth by excavating or fracturing geological formations, Bloomer said.

Ideally the underground combustion system will drastically reduce expensive and environmentally unfavorable use of water as well as gas. High costs as well as growing resistance by conservationists have stimulated increasing efforts to improve efficiency within the industry.

The project also hopes to achieve double or better the industry’s common oil recovery rates with the current mainstay of thermal production, SAGD or steam-assisted gravity drainage. It uses pairs of steam injection and bitumen flow wells. Gas burned to make the steam can top one MMBtu per barrel of bitumen produced, depending on the efficiency of the process and the quality of the oil reservoir.

As a bonus, Bloomer said empty pores left by removing bitumen turn the earth into a highly permeable sponge where waste carbon-dioxide could be permanently deposited or “sequestered” to achieve further cuts in industry greenhouse-gas emissions.

Early results are encouraging, he said. The first wall of fire is burning steadily at temperatures peaking around 700°C (1,300°F). Fluids are flowing to the surface, currently at a rate of about 1,000 b/d including condensed water from the warm-up steam injections. Oil output per well is expected to be 500 b/d or more. On the way up, bitumen shows signs of “thermo-cracking” or simmering into partially upgraded oil.

“We view this as a global technology,” Bloomer added.

Another Petrobank subsidiary, Petrominerales Ltd., is doing preliminary technical studies into trying the bitumen barbecue method on 663 square kilometers (256 square miles) of heavy oil deposits in Colombia. Discussions are also underway with state energy companies that own untapped deposits of bitumen or heavy crude from China to other parts of South America, Bloomer said.

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