If Selma Guigard is right, an elusive key to reducing the oil sands' emissions could lie in the science of the super-critical molecule.
When they are subjected to a certain high temperature and pressure, substances like carbon dioxide enter a state where they are neither liquid nor gas – the super-critical state. When mixed with several other compounds, super-critical carbon dioxide is able to extract hydrocarbons from almost anything, in a process somewhat like the way some dry cleaners work.
Dr. Guigard, an associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of Alberta, is trying to prove it can do the same for the Athabasca oil sands. This is not a mere science experiment: Lab modelling has shown that her process uses virtually no water, and less than a third of the energy spent today on bitumen extraction.
That makes it not only a potentially huge step up from an environmental point of view, it could also help redraw the economics of the oil sands.
There's only one problem. To prove the technology, Dr. Guigard needs to build a small pilot operation, and that will cost $1-million. She's spent a year banging on the doors of the energy companies that stand to gain the most from what she is developing.
They have all declined.
“The response is basically they're looking at this as still in its infancy, and so they are waiting for a little bit more research,” she said.
That puts Dr. Guigard in a bind: “They want us to be further along than we can get with the funding sources that we currently have.”
Talk to anyone in Calgary or Fort McMurray, and they will tell you that the story of the oil sands has been the story of technology. Were it not for the original hot-water extraction method, mining would never have become profitable decades ago. Were it not for the next step, the steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) techniques developed in the 1970s that use high-pressure steam to send bitumen dripping out, the more-expansive deeper oil sands would never have been tapped.
But those are by and large yesterday's techniques and methodologies. In the past nine months, the dive in oil prices has brought more than $200-billion in spending plans crashing off books, raising profound questions about the ability of the industry to prosper in the future.
In large measure, $50 (U.S.) oil has put existing oil sands technologies on life support. In recent years, companies spent half as much of their revenue on research and development as the rest of industrial Canada – far less than even farmers and fishermen.
The lack of research has helped contribute to the vulnerability of the industry to falling oil prices. Last summer, a company building a new oil sands mine needed $90 oil to be profitable. Anyone building a new SAGD operation needed $70 oil.
Costs have begun to dip in the cooling of the boom. But if ever there was a time for someone to come up with a new way of producing the oil sands – a way that's both cheaper and less environmentally heavy footed – it's now.
Several companies are chasing ways to do exactly that, using electric currents, underground fires and petrochemical solvent cocktails to accomplish leaps in efficiency and lower greenhouse gas emissions. Many of the boldest ideas, however, belong to the oil patch outsiders. They are the upstarts – the mavericks – seeking to claim Fort McMurray's future with a new vision of how oil can flow.
But that new vision is unlikely to transform the oil sands if left to the small companies alone. Both government and industry heavyweights have been slower to embrace the need for new technology.
If they do not adapt to the future and start to invest more heavily, Canada's energy industry risks shrivelling, said Jamie Blair, a former Husky Canada executive who is now advocating for a new technological era in Alberta.
