Technology used to search for signs of ancient life on Mars could play a key role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from Canada’s tar sands.
At least that’s what members of the New Pathways Alliance, an industry consortium of the country’s six largest oil sands companies, seem to believe. The group announced Thursday that Impossible Sensing Energy, a Calgary-based company affiliated with U.S. space exploration company Impossible Sensing, had won an industry-sponsored global competition to participate in accelerating use, scale of steam reduction technologies in oil sands operations.
The company won the competition with its proposal to use optical imaging technology adapted from its Sherloc system, currently installed on the Perseverance rover, for application in the oil sands.
Just as optical imaging can be used to search for faint traces of potential carbon-based past life on Mars, it can also detect precise amounts of carbon-based solvents in the oil production stream, explained Ariel Torre. , co-founder and CEO of Impossible Sensing Energy.
He added that space exploration is not unlike the oil sands, as both operate in extremely isolated environments and in harsh climatic conditions. Any technology used must be extremely sensitive, but also able to operate essentially on its own, without an operator.
“Many of NASA’s constraints are extremely similar to oil and natural gas constraints,” Torre observed.
Oil sands companies currently use huge amounts of natural gas to produce steam for in situ (deep below the surface) extraction of oil sands. The steam makes the viscous bitumen thin enough to allow it to flow to the surface.
Wes Jickling, vice president of technology development for COSIA, the innovation arm of the New Paths Alliance, noted that the industry has long known that solvents, such as propane and butane, can play a role. role similar to that of steam in the production of bitumen. If solvents could be used to replace steam in oil sands production, the amount of natural gas consumed by industry would drop dramatically.
“We are looking at a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and up to 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in some cases, by using these solvents. So the potential is huge,” Jickling said.
Another potential benefit is the ability to recover solvents injected with or instead of steam into oil sands reservoirs, and reuse them.
An expensive idea
However, a report released last year by the Pembina Institute, a green energy think tank, found that the use of solvents in the oil sands was “promising on paper” but was also associated with technical limitations and certain costs.
“The economics of using solvents with steam can be tricky [à justifier] in cycles of low crude prices, when solvent deployment and recovery costs outweigh revenues from incremental production,” the report noted.
That’s why the New Pathways Alliance sponsored the global competition, Jickling said — to try to find a technology that can accurately measure, in real time, the amount of solvents recovered from tar sands production. Efficiently and cost-effectively measuring and identifying solvents for recycling, without having to deploy staff or shut down production, could be a game-changer.
The ultimate goal is for Impossible Sensing Energy to install its technology in a pilot project at an Alliance member company’s oil sands site.
“All of this work started with a difficult question that we needed answers to,” said Jickling. This is one of the big scientific questions that we need to solve so that [l’utilisation de solvants] is widely used in industry. »
The use of solvents is just one of the technologies that the six member companies of the New Pathways Alliance are exploring as part of their commitment to reduce their collective greenhouse gas emissions from the production of 22 million tonnes by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
The key component of the group is a carbon capture and storage network project in northern Alberta, which could see its members invest $16.5 billion before 2030. The Alliance also plans additional spending of 7.6 billion for other initiatives such as energy efficiency, motor electrification and more.
Environmental groups have previously criticized the New Paths Alliance for not moving fast enough with some of its project proposals, particularly when oil prices hit record highs last year.