Tech Talk: The THAI process for bitumen and heavy oil
Posted by Heading Out on February 7, 2010 - 9:14am
For a while, when I was a student, I had an attic bedroom that was heated by a small coal fire, with a relatively short chimney up to the roof. I learned, fairly early on, that in starting the fire you needed a fairly high velocity air flow across the coals, and underlying firewood strips. And to get this I would rest a shovel over the front of the fireplace, and try and seal off the sides. I kept a small bellows beside the fire to help when this wasn’t particularly successful. When you are starting a fire underground the provision of air is critical, but when you are trying to burn the residual coke that is left, after the heat has cracked the rest of the oil and caused it to flow away, keeping that air flowing at a high enough rate to sustain the high-temperature burn becomes somewhat critical to most efficient operation, particularly if the air has to get through a sand layer to reach the fire.
This is the post on THAI – Toe to Heel Air Injection for the recovery of heavy oils, which is part of the ongoing technical post (tech talk) series that I write on Sundays. It is a subject that has been described several times in the past at The Oil Drum. I first mentioned it back in 2006 when the first underground test was underway at White Sands.
I used this illustration at the time.
It is an artist’s impression of a side view of the site, with the blue dotted horizontal line representing the recovery well and air being fed in from a higher well into the formation. The test at White Sands in Alberta has been followed by a test at Lloydminster in Saskatchewan which got underway in a more conventional heavy oil last October.
The Kerrobert project followed much on the procedures from the earlier test, and the currently planned full scale production at May River (Large pdf file)
Petrobank, which is partnered with Baytex Energy Trust on the 50/50 joint venture, recently sunk two vertical air-injection wells and two horizontal production wells into the extensive Mannville conventional oil reservoir near Kerrobert.
Compressed air was added last week after a temporary steaming of the ground to mobilize the oil around the injector site. With the addition of the air, spontaneous underground combustion has begun.
"I think we will see some oil as early as today," Bloomer said.
Don and Gail described the THAI process in 2007 and have given some history on its use, THAI having been patented by Petrobank who have a 12 minute video on the process and the first trial and preparation for full scale production. It is well worth watching.
Dave Murphy had an update on the EROI costs in March of last year.
While watching the video is the best way to understand the process, it can also be illustrated with a picture from the plan for May River and I will lift some parts of that document to describe what is planned for that site.
The horizontal wells are drilled (a suite of eighteen wells, each with a 2,000 ft horizontal section, spaced 410 ft apart) some 7 ft above the bottom of the formation (or the water table if that becomes an issue). Above these the air injection wells are drilled directionally and offset from the toe of the well. (By using directional drilling air injection can be better controlled than with the original vertical wells).
Once the wells are in position steam will be injected and circulated for a period of 3 months to bring the sand and bitumen up to around 100 deg C, then air will be injected to start combustion. The part of the bitumen that burns as the process develops is the residual asphaltene that is left after the lighter fractions are either evaporated, flow away at reduced viscocity or are cracked by the high temperature (> 400 deg C). The residual material, apparently about 10% of the OOIP, provides the fuel, driving some 90% of the fuel into the production well.
To sustain production after ignition and flame front stabilization has occurred, the wells will carry some 4.4 million cf/day into the formation, and about the same amount of a mix of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and hydrocarbon gas will be released. As the video notes that gas will be used on site to generate electricity to run the air compressors, and to provide site power. Based on the earlier tests the site is anticipated to generate some 10,000 bd of cracked bitumen, and about twice that in water production. The flame front will move forward at between 5 and 10 inches a day. The oil is projected to be a significant upgrade of the original bitumen. The water has the potential for being sold to other operators in the area for use in SAGD production.
The energy efficiency of the site is anticipated to be 85.7%. It should be noted that the document I have taken this information from also contains a conservation and reclamation plan. (But at 653 pages long for the whole document I have only noted key passages for the theme of the post).
In response to my SAGD post both Rockman and RockyMtnGuy commented about using underground combustion to help with getting the bitumen from the oil sand.
One of the things that they were concerned about, as was I, is the control of the flame front which becomes more difficult as the height of the production zone is around 70 ft. However at May River they plan on burning from the outside in, so this may control the extent to which the fire overburns. In addition, as I noted at the beginning of the post, it is rather difficult sometimes to sustain the right temperatures without a high flow of air, and that may provide a further control.
The conditions are somewhat different at Kerrobert where the oil is less viscous and the formation is around 100 ft thick. This has caused some problems since the well flows exceeded what had been anticipated:
the original plan was to use temporary hydraulic pumps on each well to create a drawdown pressure across the horizontal well and, as combustion gas production increased, pumping would cease and wells would flow by produced gas lift.
Initial fluid production volumes were tested at 180 to 300 barrels per day per well, with oil cuts ranging from zero to 40%. However, during the transition phase to gas lift it was learned that liquid inflow to the production wells exceeded the pump's capacity, which limited the ability to draw down the wells and caused frequent pump failures. On Dec. 21, the pump in KP1 was re-configured to improve its pumping capacity. Now KP2 is being re-configured and is expected to be producing at similar rates to KP1 within the next few days.
Since the re-configuration, fluid production rates from KP1 have ranged between 250 and 420 bbls per day with oil cuts averaging 36% and reaching as high as 65%. Also, the air injection rate was increased to 50,000 cubic metres per day and the produced gas rate has increased to 8,000 cubic metres per day.
Looks as though things are going quite well.
Oh, and the disadvantage of having a small coal fire in a garret flat is that during the night it went out, and in the morning I would occasionally wake up with snow in the grate.
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
When the THAI process was first discussed on TOD, I asked about the fate of the products of combustion. Burning the bitumen will result in a mixture of N2, CO2 and CO. What is the fate of these gases? Do they flow somehow thru the tar sands and exit the production wells as a mixture of gases and liquids? The description suggests that the CO is burned with the other hydrocarbon gases to provide energy to drive the process. What happens to the N2? How much CO2 enters the atmosphere per barrel of product as the result of this effort?
E. Swanson
It seems pointless.
What is the point of removing oil from the ground these days, no matter what the method, except as an emergency stop gap tool, with a better transition to electric power and alternative energy process's?
This is oil that is to be burnt later?
It is oil that is to be bought and sold to make money. Bad idea if that is the basis of this, and obviously it is.
We know that carbon burning is destructive.
Efficiency?
Using a scale of money as the base line of thinking about profit, negates the actual cost of the horrible and real health/environmental cost http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/research/themes/carbon/
Recycling carbon from multiple sources via thermopolymerization makes more sense. Then, instead of burning it maybe use it for construction material. This does not produce green house gas either, and green house gas's are a basic problem for the human race http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8394168.stm <--- Green house gas's and climate change.
The point is to stop modern civilization from screeching to a halt due to lack of oil.
There are a number of questions about electricity which are often ignored, one of which is, how are you going to generate it? At this point in time, almost half of the electricity in the US is generated by burning coal.
At this point in time, alternatives account only for a small fraction of energy production.
Not so much.
So called modern civilization is going to make a screeching halt because we are at the edge of the resource base. There is no way out of that. Just prolonging the process is going to make it worse.
Notice your idea of civilization is a throwback to the political Price System contract society invented in the middle east long ago. That system destroys itself unless it transforms into something more creative... and digging more oil out of the ground is antithetic to being creative.
Frederick Soddy figured out some of the basics of ecological economics long ago (N.Y.Times Article)
So what is the point of keeping a dysfunctional death dealing ill prepared planet killing system alive?
To make money to perpetuate the same absurd system?
Arguably our current system worked in the past but it has no chance of working in the future if survival is an issue.
We are at any time now 24 to 48 hours away from collapse. One little interruption in energy supply and it is all over and then chaos will not seem like such a good method, and maybe that reality will then change us into something else.
We find out shortly.
To buy enough time to replace it with a system which delivers similar benefits without the liabilities.
Of course, if we don't direct our efforts to that end and just exhaust the resource in its turn, it really IS for nothing.
That is SO true, and as has been discussed so many times on TOD why would anyone believe that the in-situ burning of buried coal, bitumen, peat, etc. would be for anything other than to just exhaust the resource? We have known for decades (see 1972 "Limits to Growth", etc) that the time of reduced oil and other non-renewables was in the near future. But other than a bunch of talk on a few websites nothing to change or replace the system has occurred. And what "system which delivers similar benefits without the liabilities" is out there?
Since I have not seen such a new "system" why keep increasing the atmospheric CO2 concentration so that people can perpetuate the existing one at the significant expense of future generations. Remember that the CO2 we release today stays around for a millennium.
The "collapse" of the existing system is going to happen and is most likely going to be brutal and ugly for us and our children. (Exactly how brutal and ugly will always be an unknown). Why make it worse for the future generations since they will still not have much in the way of carbon resources?
Until someone can link the pieces of how we are going to transition to another system then this is just madness on an epic scale.
Damn, John! Let's just pull the plug. Now. Tonight. I hope you are well stocked with "stuff". Wait! I need to go to the liquor store and the grocery to get some more toilet paper. Pull the plug tomorrow.
Yeah funny I know, but sadly true also. The beauty of the future is that no one knows how this plays out. The next most probable says it probably ends really badly though for a lot of people.
I guess after we get into a state of emergency... then everything will be forever different, and real changes will occur.
Trying to preserve the political Price System as is, will not be a viable option and that is good.
I guess people mean well in that continuity to another thing would be nice, but... no Hollywood ending probably unless disaster flicks and zombie type movies are faves.
Funny also because the future could be friendly, it is just a matter of agreement. But it sure looks unfriendly currently.
Crash test ahead.
Unconventional oil could never do that. The only hope is that conventional oil (exports) decline slowly.
Conventional oil production will probably decline quickly. The hope for non-conventional oil is that it will slow the decline to a pace that consumers can cope with. A "falling off the cliff" scenario would be very unpleasant for most automobile commuters.
We've already experienced that, but it could get worse.
Now there is the understatement of the week. With the arsenals and delivery systems stacked about the planet and our propensity for short sighted solutions to long term problems we better damn well hope we can keep enough oil flowing to keep the economies somewhat rolling until we derive the bulk of our power from more sustainable energy sources. A real falling off the cliff scenario would be most unpleasant for most everybody that needs to eat. Big resource constraints sucking down major military powers makes for a rocket sled ride down that cliff.
Rocky MG, with your other comments you don't give this too much hope, for instance:
The gases will be produced by the well and separated from the oil by the production facilities. Nitrogen is not a problem because the atmosphere is 78% N. The CO is extremely poisonous and will have to be dealt with somehow, probably by burning it to CO2.
However, unless they use carbon capture and sequestration methods to capture the CO2 and inject it into deeper formations, it is going to end up in the atmosphere.
As Black_Dog asks, what is the total release of carbon as a result of this process, even before the final products are burned? This process seems like a poster child for our desperation to get the energy we need. It may be profitable but, at what point do we admit that, in terms of real costs, these processes are over the top? How does this system compare to conventional recovery techniques in terms of atmospheric impact? I know that this post is limited to the technical aspects of the THAI process, but if carbon taxes/fees are inacted, will it be viable?
The large pdf that I cited as "May River" has considerable detail that goes into the answers to these questions. I didn't put that much detail into the post, since I was just describing the basic process.
The PDF file is about 21 times larger than my first hard drive (how far we've come!). I hope it's worth it. OK, here we go!
Just a few exerpts from the PDF:
The report is very detailed and long. I'm still perusing the details but it seems like a nasty proccess.
At least according to Petrobank this process is expected to produce less Co2 emmissions per barrel of oil than other in-situ techniques currently used in heavy oil fields and tar sands.
If it works, and this is certainly not proven, it will open up vast heavy oil fields to reasonably high flow, scalable high recovery rate operations.
BAU might continue quite a while longer than expected by many on these boards if technology like this (and other similar techniques) can actually be made to work
Right. It is only inevitable and this is a Venus in the making!
The crucial issue is, what price BAU?
If the price is high enough, people will start saying "**** this, I want a Chevy Volt/Nissan Leaf/something else electric." Shippers will push traffic to rail, rail operators will electrify, electric utilities will build more wind and nuclear. If that process gets far enough along, by the time BAU becomes untenable (by whatever mechanism, whether depletion or carbon levies) we will have a system to replace it with most of the benefits but few of the liabilities.
Doubtful.
The current system defeats itself because it is dysfunctional. It is not creative anymore. It is a special interest run monopoly system. We ceased being a creative culture years ago.
Yes, we can do technology in some dumbing down way, but the bottom line is still the 'cost' factor and not the bigger picture of resources and protection of resources... and the number one Rule of the Game is still profit in this system.
That does not work anymore as the game is unsupported because of its throwback things like 'purchasing power' having become an antique idea because of energy conversion taking the place of human 'work'.
Supporting corporate fascism is pointless.
Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf is still supporting a nonsense based corporate structure that cares about profit only.
They are not in the business of actually making cars... they are in the business of making money and the car thing is incidental.
Carbon levies? Why monetize something that destructive? Bad idea.
The current operating system does not get us there. It is not reformable and has to be gotten rid of.
Ghung -- I'm not too familiar with the details of THAI but it’s a modification of the basic in situ combustion process I studied some time ago. In ISC you’re injecting air in one set of wells and producing from another set. It’s difficult to detail without an illustration but what you’re describing is one of the determining factors in the economic viability of the project. In an ideal application very little of the combustion gases (CG’s) are produced. The oil moves ahead of the gas bank and is recovered. If the structural relationship of the injectors and produces is not ideal the CG bank might override the oil bank and be the major production product. This would cause a rapid loss in reservoir pressure and the oil would stop moving. In that sense excessive CG production kills the project. If only some of the producers “gas out” the process might continue thru the remaining oil wells. The “gased out” wells would be shut in since continued production defeats the whole purpose of reservoir repressuring. Another limiting factor is as the fire front )and CG's) near a producer you need to inject water into the producer: if you let the fire front progress all the way to the producing well it will destroy it.
I can’t offer a scale at which the production of the combustion gases kill the economics but in general air injection is a rather expensive operation and does not lend itself well to the low efficiency of significant CG production. I suspect THAI is at least as sensitive to such inefficiency as basic ISC. Thus, to some degree, the concern over combustion gas production might be somewhat unfounded: produce the CG’s and you kill the project. Kill the project and no oil or CG’s are produced.
Thanks, Rock.
I don't have time to go back to the PDF right now, but my main concern, if I read the post above correctly, was that the amount of combined gasses expelled from the formation would be roughly equivalent to the amount of air injected:
Involving millions of CFD, this seemed a bit over the top. I sure wouldn't want to be downwind of this thing. I noticed the PDF contained many pages of "dispersion models" (in case of a "malfunction" it seems). Maybe it was their use of the word "released" that got my attention. I'm assuming that these gasses will normally be exhausted via piping so that the hydrocarbons can be utilized, but it all ends up in the atmosphere in some form unless some type of sequestration is implemented. Just some thoughts.
They could inject the produced CO2 into deeper formations, but this is a pilot project, so they aren't implementing that part of the process yet. First, they need to actually get the process working and producing oil.
Based on my own experience with fireflood projects in the oil sands, the prognosis is not good. They might be luckier than my former employer and get the process to actually work, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
So at this point, the concern is all hypothetical. If they actually get it to produce oil in commercial quantities, then they'll probably start worrying about what to do with the produced CO2.
You will note in the PDF that the Alberta government is more concerned about SO2 and H2S disposal. They have considerable experience with these gases. They'll worry about CO2 when they have nothing else to worry about.
Don't have a hard answer Ghung but the economics of the process depends upon increasing reservoir pressure with the generation of CG's. If you're producing that much CG volume then you're dropping the pressures back down and loosing much (if not all) of the drive force. OTOH, I recall that the ISC process can produces 10X as much volume of CG as the air injected volume (but that includes the non-nasty CG's like N2). Thus your statement may be true or even understated when just comparing absolute volumes.
But, as Rocky points out, I wouldn't worry too much until they start making a profit. Then we can look at the by product. You might be able to tell I'm not overly optimistic about the economics. They might get the oil to move but it will be relatively slow compared to other ISC projects I've studied (high quality and easily movable crude). And hz wells and air injection are very expensive EOR techniques.
I think the PDF talks about a 1:1 ratio of injected oxygen versus produced CO and CO2. The N2 comes back as N2. The government is more concerned about SO2, H2S, and NOx. The amount of CO2 produced by the pilot will not be that significant.
And really, most of the CO2 production occurs when you burn the products in your car.
Great info and great video. Thank you Heading Out.
This looks like it could be the real Game Changer. High energy return on usable energy invested, plus a large resource = decades of cheap energy.
1) At what point does increased flows from THAI offset declines in existing production? Two years from now?
2) How useful is THAI for conventional reservoirs in the rest of the world? Could THAI be used on the East Texas field?
Thank you.
Don't get that excited yet. The process is only just getting into initial field trials, and though it looks promising there may be some snags that are not yet obvious but that become clearer as the results continue to come in. But I must confess it is doing better than I had originally expected.
Heading Out, 1500 bopd for one rather big project. So 1000 of those projects needed to extract 1,5 mbd. Some big projects are projected to extract 100.000 bopd. Only 15 of those needed to extract 1,5 mbd. But what will happen with this planned projects if debt unwind reduces demand for oil ?
There is a set of very logical reasons why, when you have a new technology such as this, you move carefully from one level of scale-up to the next. There are a lot of imponderables at each different site, and as the different scales and it is thus important that each test be run long enough and get enough information before moving to the next level.
And at a certain point it may be that there are disadvantages to increasing the scale of a given project at a site beyond a certain size. I don't think we have enough data to make those decisions yet, and so working out all that would be required for a certain level of production is still a bit conjectural.
Nothing changes. It's BAU, just dirtier.
There are a number of other new processes out there. One impression some of us have had is that Petrobank is not really emphasizing THAI as much as they were at one time--perhaps scaling back expectations, at least for quite timing. This is a link to a recent report. This is a link to a recent presentation.
If this process works it might put a couple trillion barrels of oil into the recoverable column. Fast food restaurants might remain open a few decades more. People might hop on a flight to the Caribbean to get out of hypothermia land in the winter. Some might take delivery of heating oil instead of going out into the woods with a flashlight to look for kindling wood. The predicted catastrophic peak oil might be delayed.
rainsong
Care to quote a few sources for your grand exposition.
You seem capable of sloshing around a couple of trillion barrels like you really know what you are writing about.
An EROI of 8.9 seem to indicate to me a process that is only likely to be funded when all other avenues are exhausted.
By that time we are likely to be on the steep slide to collapse that is likely to occur from EROI 10.
There is evidence that we are already at EROI 11.
Maintaining the workforce and providing all the required services in remote areas seems likely to push this towards EROI 5, which means it will probably never happen except perhaps as a source of plastics towards the end of the century.
To quote from the May River document:
At the current state of oil depletion, the value of 6 for SAGD is pretty good compared to not having oil at all. The EROEI for fuel ethanol production is probably closer to 1.
The EROEI of 44 for THAI is exemplary in the modern world. Of course, that assumes the process works as planned.
The EROEI for bitumen recovery and refining is higher than the EROEI of cellulosic ethanol and the government endorsed cellulosic ethanol that will not bring a new era or prosperity.
I had to base my statement on the Petrobank's projections. There project has endured numerous setbacks, but they seem to be sticking with their story of high recovery rates, over 70 percent of OOIP recoverie rates.
There is much more heavy oil in the world than in Canada and Venezuela alone. It does not appear as reserves as there was little hope of recovering it. Theoretically some deep heavy oil could not be reached by SAGD, but may be reached by THAI, so far the CAPRI side of the testing has not added the amount of API improvement that was hoped for after lab results.
I used the word "might" add two trillion in recoverable reserves, not "will" add two trillion.
85.7% of what?
I'm not getting the EROEI of all this?
is all the extraction energy derived on site from the resource so "in essence" the final product is "free" and the eroei is just a measure of how much of the resource is depleted for the end product used elsewhere?
is resource depleted at a greater ratio than mining it out even if flow rates are increased?
basically which process produces the most net oil from the OOIP?
I take it Toe to Heel has greater flow rates per unit area?
The idea behind fireflood systems like THAI is that you burn some of the heavier components of the oil to produce the lighter components. Since you aren't much interested in the heavier components, the fact that they are burned is immaterial. If you produced them you'd be stuck with the problem of disposing of them somehow. They can't be turned into gasoline or diesel fuel.
So, the 44:1 EROEI does not include the heavy ends burned to produce the lighter ends. It only includes running the production equipment and a bit of initial steaming.
SAGD, with an EROEI of 6:1, works extremely well. You can count on getting good production rates and extremely high recovery rates. It actually works better in practice than in theory. With THAI - we'll see.
Similar fireflood projects I worked on produced very little oil and wrecked the whole oil field, but you never know. They might be on to something. Or not.
the video suggests that they get 70-80% recovery...
so for the idiots here like me that need it spelling out what are they/we saying here?
there is 10TB equiv of this stuff approx... we can insitu burn 2TB worth and extract the other 8TB?
I notice some posters are quoting a 2TB effective/equivalent addition to global reserves...where does this 2TB fig come from?
back of the envelope
so guestimates of 4m/d equiv a year to offset conventional depletion..
big THAI projects = 100,000b/d
so 40 large scale THAIs come online a year to hold the plateau
how doable is that?
In the May River application they told the Alberta government they could get 70% recovery of the bitumen in place. Most of the rest would be burned in the combustion process or left behind in the formation. The Alberta government questioned the 70% number, but it was just a question, they just wanted them to justify it.
However, let's not deal with big numbers like 10 trillion barrels or 2 trillion barrels. Based on Alberta government documents and statements by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, there is somewhere between 170 and 300 billion barrels of oil that they could potentially produce by this process - assuming it works. And note - this is the same 170 billion barrels that Alberta already claims as reserves because it could be produced using SAGD, which already works and is in large-scale production.
This is not really rocket science, it's just an elaboration of processes we developed 40 years ago. There's more oil there, but it will require more advanced techniques to be invented to produce it. There are other people working on that problem.
Thanks, interesting perspective.
I take a cynical view i.e. capital is required, it has to be significantly better than existing techniques to get noticed.
So the lowest figure for EROEI that can be deduced from their figures is likely to be optimistic.
SAGD works but for how much longer can the OEDC pay 5% GDP for declining flows of oil when all growth and loan servicing depends on increasing flows.
Actually, no. Each of Canada and Venezuela has more heavy oil than the rest of the world combined. There are very few places in the world where geological forces have come together to produce these huge oil sands deposits, and Canada and Venezuela have by far the biggest ones. Everything else is minor by comparison.
Those two countries account for about 2/3 of ultimately recoverable global oil reserves.
Canadian and Venezuelan heavy oil deposits are shallow. Much deep heavy oil is not even on the internet first page of heavy oil sites or classified as reserves as there is little hope of getting it out of the ground unless this fireflood method will deliver. The heavy oil is there in hundreds of billions of barrels, but not classified as reserves. They were saying we were going over the natural gas cliff a few years ago. There was panic to build LNG import ports and then a while later someone posted in TOD about whether or not the US should build LNG liquefication facilities to export gas. The situation with oil might change with technology. Petrobank stated they are not far from success. Efforts to switch to biofuels might have been premature. There has been a great loss in old growth forests and more and more forests are comprised of saplings. Science revealed burning wood to heat homes is much more efficient than racing cars with ethanol made from it, but the leaders of the world were often isolated in glass towers and did not want to be told what is efficient. Petrobank does not have a year of production data as proof of their abilities to produce, but they have plans that might result in the production that is needed.
Enough already; only in America, perhaps only in corporate America.
There are no other heavy oil deposits to rival Canada and Venezuela, deep or otherwise. Each has around 2 trillion barrels of oil in place - roughly equivalent to the world's reserves of conventional oil, and ultimately (over the next few centuries), we might recover 20-30% of them, giving somewhere around 800 billion to 1.2 trillion barrels of oil production.
At current world consumption rates of 30 billion barrels per year, that would give 27 to 40 years of reserves. However, it is going to take a lot longer than that to produce the oil - probably centuries - so the world oil consumption rate must fall to a much lower level than it is today.
RMG,
THAI seems to recover 70-80% of oil in place. Look http://www.petrobank.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/2010JanPBGPresentati...
For postponing the PO problems, all the planned projects will come too late.
Yeah, yeah. You have to read the promotional literature with a grain of salt.
Petrobank claims that THAI can get 70% recovery, but they haven't done the pilot project yet, so they're just guessing. The true answer might be 0% for all we know.
The documents submitted to the Alberta government are more realistic because misleading a government is illegal and you can go to jail for it. However, the documents are huge and not terribly readable for the average person. The Alberta government does its own estimates of recoverable reserves and doesn't rely on company estimates. All the companies have to turn all their core samples and well logs over to the government, and that's what the government works from.
To put it in perspective, working from Alberta government data, only about 20% of the resource is suitable for THAI, so the best case scenario is 70% of 20%, which is 14% of the total 2 trillion barrels, or about 280 billion barrels - plus or minus 100%.
The 20 to 30% recovery rate of the total resource I mentioned would be using technology that hasn't been invented yet, under economic conditions that don't exist yet , so it's all theoretical. I just threw it out to give people a feel for the ultimate recovery possible from oil sands over the next couple of centuries if conventional oil production declined drastically. However the constraining factor is economics, not geology, so the recovery rate won't be very high.
Rocky MG, thanks, your explanation makes sense.
What could be the reason that THAI is only suitable for 20% of the reserves ? 80% too deep in the ground ?
Various reason might make it unsuitable for THAI - oil formation is too scattered, oil saturation is too low, formation is too shallow, etc. Too deep is probably not a problem, if it is too shallow, the fire might break out on the surface.
They need a relatively homogeneous oil formation, relatively high in oil content to make this work.
Assuming it works at all. It's still experimental.
Rocky MG, the comment from Heading Out:
seems promising however.
It is not the volume of what's recoverable that matters. It is the size of the straw that matters. Low EROEI means lesser barrels "stored" per used barrel.
Haven't you seen all the data about how the "vast reserves of tar sands and shales" will likely make only a small dent to the overall picture?
Thirdly, like wells has pointed out in the other comment, the economic viability will likely arrive only after the peak. I don't see how this can postpone the peak.
It can't. We're probably past the peak already, and it's all downhill from here.
Peak liquid fuels, but remember, there were two peaks of liquids production (2005 and 2008). There are resources like wind, solar and nuclear that we have barely begun to use compared to their potential; some peaks are still in the distant future, and none of us are likely to live to see them.
That's very true. However, some people still persist in worrying about them. I've never understood that. I've always thought that I should worry most about the most immediate peak, which would be peak oil.
Yesterday on a Venezuela T.V. channel:
They are going to develop 7 of the 27 blocks of the Orinoco belt. Investors from Japan, Malaysia, China, Spain, U.S. (Chevron) are involved who spent $ 800 billion until 2016.
Projected production in 2016: 2mbd (is now 0.6 mbd oil from bitumen).