Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be here today.
I'm here representing Petrobank Energy and Resources. By way of background, we operate throughout western Canada as well as in Latin America, and have great exposure to both the regulatory and environmental challenges of the heavy oil and oil sands industry throughout those regions, as well as some of the global implications of that.
Within our heavy oil group, we maintain a technology division, which actually owns some of our proprietary intellectual property. I'm going to talk about some of that today. But the focus of the company in particular is to find global solutions to the heavy oil challenges faced not just in Alberta but throughout the world in all the heavy oil basins.
In terms of location—this might help with Michel's presentation as well—we operate directly to the west of the Devon Jackfish operation, at our Whitesands project area. This is in situ central. That tiny map shown on the right actually represents about 600,000 barrels a day of planned and approved projects in one very tiny part of the oil sands, all of which will be derived by in situ means, none of which is accessible through conventional mining methods.
What we're doing is something radically different from anything that has been tried before. Our Whitesands projects implements the THAI process. I could go on for hours about how this works, but in a nutshell, the acronym, THAI, stands for “toe to heel air injection”. Rather than using steam or combusting natural gas on the surface, we drill a horizontal well at the bottom of the reservoir and a vertical well at the toe of that horizontal well, and we inject air, atmospheric air under pressure. The air contacts the bitumen in situ and generates an oxidization reaction that will have temperatures ranging between 700°C and 1,000°C in the combustion zone. That heat mobilizes the oil, actually has the effect of partially upgrading the oil in situ and drops out a percentage of the coke, and all the oil flows naturally to the surface.
In one little slide I can show you the highly underwhelming impact of our surface facilities. There is no water treating facility. There are no steam-generating facilities. It's a simple oil battery and air compressor system.
The key to THAI is more than just the fact that we don't use any fresh water in our process. We actually produce a usable water stream. We've eliminated the use of natural gas. We've increased the recovery rates, with about half the greenhouse gas emissions of any of the other processes available today. Because we have a partially upgraded oil product, we actually have simplified our operations on the surface, and of course, a much smaller surface footprint means that the total overall impact of the process is very minimal.
The best way to characterize the oil that comes out of the ground is that the bitumen that's derived from most processes is like the bitumen shown on the left in our slide. It's actually heavier than water and does not pour at room temperature. On the right in our slide, you'll see our THAI upgraded oil, which has a viscosity that's pipeline-able at surface conditions and is in fact about 4° API to 5° API lighter than the in situ bitumen. That oil is about a 12° API crude.
The importance of having a light oil product in the heavy oil world means that your process becomes much simpler. Our oil floats on the produced water component, which means we have an easily separated emulsion, allowing us access to a very clean produced water stream that has some great characteristics.
When you compare the produced water that we take off our separators, we actually have very similar water characteristics to the water that Devon is taking from the aquifers directly adjacent to us. In fact, our produced water would pretty well match their feed water for their process and would provide another source of water for other industrial uses as well.
The last thing I might emphasize about the water that's produced is that, from the secondary condensing, we actually condense a purer steam component, which means we condense, effectively, distilled water from our process, which has direct use in power generation applications and other applications.
To finish it all off--we all seem to have pictures of this--this slide shows what a typical surface application for our well sites would look like.
The final slide slows the minimal surface impact we would have for a process facility that would be capable of up to 100,000 barrels a day of commercial oil production.
That's our story.