Oilsands Group Pioneers Incentive Prizes

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh helped design a special plane that allowed him to make aviation history in 1927 with the first solo  transatlantic flight. Few people know the feat was encouraged by a $25,000 incentive prize first offered by an hotelier named Orteig.

Incentive prizes, also called open sourcing, are used by leading organizations around the world, from NASA, to source  technology for commercial space flights, to the Earth Challenge, to remove carbondioxide from the atmosphere.

And now, a pioneering group of five oilsands operators – ConocoPhillips Canada, Nexen, Statoil Canada, Suncor Energy and Total E&P Canada – are using incentive prizes to find solutions to two very different issues facing in situ operations. The five companies are founding members of a collaborative network called the Oil Sands Leadership Initiative or OSLI.

OSLI is currently evaluating responses to its first incentive challenge, to find new methods of accurately counting individual  mammals in the boreal forest of northern Alberta, where oilsands operations are concentrated.

A second incentive prize is being offered to find game-changing steam generation technology that could reduce the cost and  environmental footprint of Alberta’s most frequently used in situ recovery method — Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD).

To date, cameras, scat detection dogs, visual aerial surveys and collaring with GPS/telemetry units have been used to count  large ungulates such as caribou, moose, deer, wood bison and predators like coyotes and wolves. However, the group believes more accurate counts are needed to determine if there is an issue with an animal population and that industry mitigation programs are working.

“We think there must be stuff out there, whether it’s infrared technology, or perhaps something from the military,” says Will  Hughesman, OSLI’s Land Stewardship chairman. “Someone else must be looking at ways to count animals accurately without being invasive.”

The open-sourcing projects are being managed by NineSigma, which posts details of the OSLI challenges online and  distributes them to some 1,500 highly connected groups in the academic and research world. These groups pass on the  information to others who might have an interest.

OSLI’s second incentive challenge is aimed at finding new steam production technology that operates using lower quality water, explains Craig Pichach, an engineer working with OSLI’s Technology Breakthrough group.

SAGD requires large volumes of steam, which are injected into the ground to heat bitumen until it flows and can be pumped to  he surface. The steam is produced using brackish water found deep underground that naturally contains impurities such as silica.

Impurities must be removed before brackish water is used to produce steam, which is injected into the reservoir and then recovered and cooled until it becomes water once again. Called process water, it is recycled and used to produce more steam for the SAGD operation.

Since three to 10 per cent of the steam is lost to the reservoir and evaporation, more brackish water is added, which means further treatment.

Pichach, an oil sands surface technical engineer with Nexen, says reducing the number of steps and treatment facilities required for treating brackish water would reduce the use of natural gas and associated carbon dioxide emissions from SAGD operations.

“We’re trying to improve the economics of SAGD since there is a lot of bitumen that can be accessed using this technology,” he says.