Dr.
Paul Hazendonk of the University of Lethbridge specializes in nuclear magnetic
resonance (NMR), a discipline related to sub-atomic physics, which is basic
science. He’s passionate about the importance of fundamental research which, in
his view, doesn’t get the respect it deserves.
Investing
entirely in applied science is like “eating our seed grain,” he says. “The good
ideas originate with basic science. You have to be patient. If you aren’t
generating new ideas, ultimately you’re going to run the well dry.”
Academically
prolific – he has received two dozen research grants, published 66 peer-reviewed
papers and given 125 technical presentations – Hazendonk was the lead
researcher in a team that presented published its findings in a highly
technical paper in the American Chemical Society journal Energy and Fuels, which Hazendonk calls “the premier journal in
oil chemistry for fossil fuels.” The paper describes in chemical terms the architecture
and inter-molecular interactions of asphaltenes – the most complex and gunkiest
constituent of bitumen. Chemically speaking, asphaltenes include elemental
carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur, plus molecules of nickel, iron
and vanadium, for example.
The next stage of his
work will be to get better NMR images of the structure of asphaltenes through the
wonders of fluorine chemistry. “We want to distributes fluorine evenly through the
asphaltene molecules, and we want to make sure it doesn’t chew up the molecules
– fluorine is even is even more reactive than oxygen. If we want to better
understand this molecule, we need to be able to read fluorine signals because
they give us a much more easy to read profile. We’re going to introduce 1%
fluorine to replace 1% hydrogen, and that is going to make the spectra a lot
less blurry, a lot easier to walk across than when you’re using hydrogen. We’ve
got to be careful that we just got the right conditions. It will take a few
years of the graduate student’s life to get those conditions just right….” And
life in the lab goes on.
In a news release about
this publication, the university’s public relations department went over the
top, suggesting that this discovery would contribute enormously to the oilsands
business – enabling the industry to cut costs by reducing the “energy overhead” involved getting bitumen out of the ground,
transporting and upgrading it.
“Excuse
the pun,” says Hazendonk, “but we have to focus our energies. Right now [the
industry is] throwing a lot of heavy guns at bitumen extraction, when just a
rifle might suit. There are a lot of things we just don’t know – for example, the
amount of energy that goes into all the processes. The only way you can reduce some
of these costs, really, is to have a better understanding of how asphaltenes
work.” He adds that more efficient
operations lead to fewer greenhouse gas emissions, making the sector more
environmentally sustainable. “The better you understand the basics, the cleaner
the petroleum product [you can produce]. If the petroleum isn’t clean, it’s
harder to transport, harder to pipeline because asphaltene particles aggregate,
cling together. [In pipelines] they can be like cholesterol in arteries,
creating blockages. The metals they contain can gunk up refinery catalysts.
Sometimes they actually shut the processes down.”
The problem with
academia
If
these claims about the implications of this study seem too good to be true,
that’s because they are. At least that’s the position of Randy Mikula, one of
the paper’s authors. The oilsands consultant describes this statement as “typical
of what comes out of the university’s PR department. They try to make a big
deal out of what is really just interesting science. Unfortunately, it’s all
too common. They tend to forget that they are there to train highly qualified
people and hopefully those highly qualified people would go out and do the
kinds of things that are being claimed in that press release. The fundamental
science represented in this paper has nowhere near that big an impact.”
“This
is just one piece of the puzzle,” he continues. “It isn’t going to solve the
argument about the structure of asphaltenes. It’s an interesting approach, with
nuclear magnetic resonance, but the suggestion in the press release that we are
creating a revolution is leading us down the primrose path. We’ll see what the
rest of the technical community thinks about it. [In my view] it’s a niche
contribution at best.”
Anil
Jain is another serious critic of these claims. Like Hazendonk, Jain has a PhD
in chemistry, with a specialty in catalytic reactor design and operations.
However, he also has a strong background in industrial research and
development. He first worked with Union Carbide, then for Petro Canada, where
his career path took him from research to refinery management, oilsands
operations and then finance. After the merger, he retired from Suncor as senior
director of supply chain services.
The
paper is fine, he says. “I assume it is peer-reviewed and all that. The problem
is with the press release, which is really overhyped. It’s all generic stuff.
The suggestion that it is going to quickly have an impact on the oil sands
industry just doesn’t make sense. [And while the] use of a fluoride apparatus
to study [asphaltenes] may be helpful, so what? Is it important to nail this
stuff down to the nth degree? Do we really need to know how much the molecule
resonates and how much it spins and that kind of thing? At some point you have
to say ‘I understand it well enough,’ and then move on.” Now he’s on a roll.
“Let’s
look at the stages of research,” he says. “You begin with analytical work,
which is what is being done in this paper. Let’s assume that this work is
successful. Then you go through five stages. The first is a bench-scale effort.
[This gives you] some hypotheses about what can happen from a piece of
research.” At that point, a typical corporation conducts tests to see whether
they can go from that step to a technology that will improve the upgrading
process.
Perhaps
the bench-scale tests will justify pilot plant experiments. “This is
significantly larger, and it can involve a lot of equipment and machines.” If that
works, “you build a demonstration facility, which will maybe cost $50 or $100
million. The idea is to demonstrate that the idea will really work. And if it
does, you apply it to a large-scale plant. When
I was working on the upgrading of bitumen we often looked at reports on
asphaltenes, and did research that took us through all of those stages – bench
scale, pilot plants and so on. But our focus was not to understand asphaltenes
in the analytical sense. We wanted to work around the issue – to make the
business work better.”
How
often do new ideas work? The numbers are Darwinian. “Think about it this way,”
says Jain. “Suppose the analytical work produces 1,000 ideas. Out of that,
maybe 100 will make it to bench-scale testing. Maybe 20 will make it to the
pilot plant stage, five to the demonstration plant and one to the final,
commercial stage.”
There
are many reasons why ideas don’t work. “Maybe they are unsuccessful technically.
Maybe there are better, cheaper solutions.” Whatever the case, it’s important
to understand that seeing an idea collapse into the scrapheap of history
doesn’t mean failure. “Think about cancer. How many times have we heard about a
breakthrough in cancer research? We hear about it all the time, but cancer is
still with us. What happens is that the media get all excited and publish the
headline. They are way ahead of the science.”
Mikula
agrees. “The distance between fundamental research and commercial application
can be huge. It can take many, many, many years. One of the problems the
academic community faces is that the oil industry compared to many other parts
of the resource sector is very, very high-tech. They do a lot of research
in-house, and they do it confidentially – perhaps by contracting the work out
to other research institutions. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if some of
the higher-end research facilities are already familiar with this result, but
for reasons of their own haven’t published it.”
Spending in the lab…
“A
lot of organizations, both public and private, are doing this kind of
research,” he adds. “Researchers are constantly publishing papers, and a huge
amount of information is in the public domain. However, there is an awful lot
of information that is not made public. The reason, of course, is that so much
work is funded by corporations with commercial interests, who want to gain a
competitive advantage over their peers. As Jain puts it, companies fund research
“with the hope that one day they can realize a significant return on their
investment. Those companies don’t want their competitors to know what they’re
doing.”
A
recent report on corporate R&D funding listed four oilsands companies and
one gas company among Canada’s 25 top 2012R&D spenders. The top spenders
were CNRL ($270 million), Cenovus ($264), Imperial Oil ($201), Syncrude ($157)
and EnCana ($127). Suncor, which for some reason didn’t appear on the
100-company list, budgeted $175 million for R&D spending in 2013, but it is
also heavily involved in advanced (and expensive) field tests and demonstration
projects.
“It’s the bread-and-butter” of these companies
to do research “and patent the stuff at the appropriate time,” says Anil Jain.
He cautions against expecting a quick payout. Companies don’t apply for patents
until a technology is “close to commercialization, or when they think their
information might be at risk of being leaked out. Assuming these things don’t
fizzle out in the early years, [commercial applications] might take 30, 40, 50
years to materialize.”
In
Canada, the petroleum industry’s top R&D spenders invested about $1 billion
in research in 2012, compared to $1.9 billion for Bombardier and $1.5 billion
for Blackberry. When the oilsands are such a vital part of the Canadian economy
– bitumen exports alone now make up 4% of Canada’s GDP – why did they put such
a small amount into R&D funding?
According
to Randy Mikula this is partly because most big oil companies are multinational.
Exxon, BP, Total and Shell, for example, are the parent companies of oilsands operators,
and they conduct much of lab work elsewhere. Shell and Total have labs all
around the world, including facilities in Calgary, and Exxon subsidiary Imperial
Oil also has a lab in Calgary.
Of
course, in terms of scientific research into the oil sands, the granddaddy of
them all is the University of Alberta, which in 1921 hired Karl Clark to
investigate the oil sands. Today, more than 1,000 U of A researchers study the oilsands
and their environmental effects.
Syncrude
has an Edmonton research facility focused entirely on the oil sands. “There’s
tremendous work being done there, with a lot of it being contracted out,”
according to Mikula – for example, to the CANMET (Canada Centre for Mineral and
Energy Technology) research centre at nearby Devon, Alberta. This federally-funded
130-person lab specializes in oil sands and heavy oil, focusing in areas the
organization describes as extraction and tailings; water management; multiphase
systems; upgrading oil sands and heavy oil; and future fuels and emissions. CANMET
Devon works on about 150 client-sponsored projects a year, with partners the
agency describes as “small [clients] to major international energy
corporations.”
And in the field
Based
on Anil Jain’s model of five stages of research and development, the big
spending on the oilsands isn’t done in the laboratory, but in the field. Here’s
an illustration of a potential game-changer that would involve big spending in
the field.
In a recent research report, Calgary-based
Peters & Co. discussed eight emerging and developing technologies being
tested in SAGD operations. Oilsands
Review readers will be familiar with electro-magnetic heating; solvent injection;
thermal cracking and solvent de-asphalting to turn bitumen into pipeline-ready
heavy oil; the application of heated solvents; the injection of non-condensable
gas with steam; the addition of solvents to steam; and steam flooding.
Not so the SHORE process,
which the Peters’ organization says may offer “the potential for the most
significant game-changer.” Developed by two research groups within ExxonMobil, the
acronym SHORE refers to “slurrified heavy oil recovery extraction.” This
experimental in situ technique has three stages.
First, the operator produces a
bitumen-sand-water slurry from an in situ oilsands formation by pumping
high-pressure water into the reservoir. This relieves stress caused by overburden
and increases the reservoir’s porosity and permeability. Second, the slurry is
processed at surface to extract bitumen. According to a paper delivered to the
Society of Petroleum Engineers, the project would likely recover more than 50% of
the bitumen produced per well, with wells producing some 1,000 to 2,000 barrels
per day. “The high well production rates translate to draining of any given
reservoir volume in 2-3 years,” added the authors. Finally, the cleaned
tailings, sand and other wastes would be injected back into the reservoir.
“We
have developed a first principles numerical model of the process that fully
accounts for fluid flow and sand flow under reservoir conditions to simulate
and understand the process, according to the SPE paper. “We have also developed
a large scale…laboratory system to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the
process under reservoir conditions.”
The
eight authors caution that “the technology is still in the early stages of
development, but the laboratory and numerical modeling efforts demonstrate
promising technical potential of the process at a field-scale. The ability of
the process to work in thinner and more geologically complex reservoirs than
other in situ processes, and with lower CO2 and surface footprints than thermal
and mining processes, could make this an attractive alternative recovery
process for shallow to intermediate depth, in situ bitumen resources.”
The
conclusion Peters & Co. reaches is also cautious, but enthusiastic. The
firm says the process could “allow for the development of substantial volumes
of resources (thin pay or low saturation or at shallow but un-mineable depths)
that cannot be recovered with any other existing technology. That said, it will
take…time and capital to develop [it] to commerciality.”
