Solutions for managing economic opportunities while reducing environmental footprints

By Allan Fogwill, COO, Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada

The Canadian oil & gas industry is challenged with balancing environmental management with economic development, competitiveness, and value-added opportunities. While some companies have the resources to develop and manage their own research and development programs, all the producers and service companies benefit from a collaborative approach to new research. Collaboration can leverage the resources of all stakeholders to better deliver on new research and technologies.

Given these challenges, the Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada (PTAC) has been operating as a neutral non-profit facilitator of collaborative R&D and technology development. It operates in partnership with all industry stakeholders to deliver on technology and business process solutions to address these challenges. Over the past 25 years, this collaborative approach managed by PTAC has: • Facilitated over 450 projects worth more than $180 M from an industry contribution of only $30 M. • Conducted technical committee collaborates with over 250 volunteers and 200 member organizations including

producers, technology vendors and academia. • Aided the oil & gas sector in the development, field testing and deployment of technology solutions to address the challenges of environmental management, cost savings, value added products and solutions for net-zero. • Saved industry over $90 M in operating costs per year.

This year as in past years, PTAC is working with industry, government, and regulatory volunteers to assess over 50 projects for the new intake for 2022/23. These projects address issues related to air emissions management – in particular, methane. In addition, challenges being considered include reclamation, well management, water management, and ecosystem management.

Oil & gas stakeholders have several programs to access in order to move forward on various projects. These are:

CANADIAN EMISSIONS REDUCTION INNOVATION CONSORTIUM (CANERIC)

The CanERIC program is a pan-Canadian network of researchers and end-users collaborating to develop and deploy technologies to reduce methane emissions. This network is providing industry with a platform to articulate and rank their most pressing methane emission challenges.

Clean Tech technology vendors can better understand the potential market for their products and develop appropriate solutions. The industry works collaboratively with the technology vendors to lab and field test their technologies, and the vendors are able to refine their designs with the testing information. Institutional and academic members are also involved in CanERIC to provide the expertise to conduct the lab tests and monitor and analyze field tests for the network.

SYSTEMATIC THIRD-PARTY VALIDATION (STV) AND METHANE CONSORTIA PROGRAM (MCP)

Even if a technology is field tested and proven to be cost-effective and reduce methane emissions, the SMEs still face the challenge of increasing the market uptake of that technology. To attempt to mitigate this challenge, PTAC launched two consortia that pay up to 75 per cent of the cost of equipment and installation of cost-effective methane mitigation technologies, encouraging Canadian pro-