Weyburn field, with CO2 injection well on left and production well on right.
Back to the future
T
he old adage that history repeats is not the best place to start an article about innovation. After all, innovation by
its very definition implies newness, uniqueness and originality – not the repetition of things that came before. But the fact that the rest of the world is coming around to the innovative research projects that the Petroleum Technology Research Centre (PTRC) has been involved with since 1998 is a sign that the company was, and continues to be, well ahead of conventional approaches to enhanced oil recovery. PTRC managed and directed research for 15 years related to the measurement and monitoring of injected CO2 at the Weyburn and Midale oil fields in southeastern Saskatchewan. That project – though the final research results were published five years ago – continues to reverberate globally. The United States Department of Energy, a major funder of the Weyburn research, is also in possession of a final PTRC report filed in 2016 that includes expanded results from wellbore and overburden testing at the two oil fields. “We routinely get requests for copies of the best practices manual that came out in 2013,” notes Norm Sacuta,
Interest in PTRC’s expertise has also increased with passage of a law called 45Q in the United States in 2017, which provides tax credits of up to $US35 per ton for CO2 utilization in formations like oil fields, and up to $US50 per ton for permanent CO2 storage in deep saline and other disposal formations. “45Q has had a dramatic effect on the ramping up of possible CO2 storage projects in places like North Dakota and Texas,” says PTRC’s CEO Dan MacLean. “In turn, that’s created more life in European and Asian projects, which have been accessing PTRC expertise for monitoring CO2 movements underground.”
Solvent research at PTRC Many of the new market drivers for sources of CO2 in the U.S. are based on a need for carbon dioxide as a solvent in different kinds of oil fields – everything from the Bakken in North Dakota and Montana to more conventional fields in Texas. In Canada, oil companies in both Saskatchewan and Alberta are also searching for CO2 to enhance their recovery operations. Ongoing enhanced oil recovery research by the PTRC has played a role in companies seeing the benefits of CO2, along with other solvents – especially in the heavy oil fields of Saskatchewan.
PTRC has funded a number of studies into cyclic solvent injection in the last few years, along with field trials using solvent vapour extraction. The success of this research has led to some industrial-scale pilots by heavy oil operators along the border with Alberta. “Weyburn and Aquistore are, of course, flagship projects for us,” says MacLean, “but we’ve not been resting on our laurels. We understand that there is still much we can offer in terms of research and consultation on the use of solvents in different kinds of oil reservoirs. And with Alberta’s Trunk Line possibly supplying CO2 in the next few years to oil fields in both provinces, we want to make sure different kinds of reservoirs, and different kinds of solvent technologies like CSI, are ready to go.” Contact the PTRC to find out more about Aquistore and our solventbased EOR research, and visit the company’s website at ptrc.ca. v
the director of communications for the PTRC. “With our additional research in the past five years around the Aquistore deep saline CO2 storage project, requests for our researchers to speak in the U.S. and globally are increasing.” 22 Saskatchewan Oil Report 2020
Visitors inspect a fiberglass-covered CO2 injection well.
