Challenges in the oil sands are par for the course

A new stage of bitumen evolution counts on technology

By Bill Sass

September 15, 2008

The first mega oil sands plants built from scratch by home-grown Alberta firms waste no time gloating and face up to fresh challenges. After four years of construction by up to 8,500 workers for $15 billion, production crews are starting two megaprojects that will collect more bragging rights.

With only their first phases built, the Horizon and Long Lake developments bracketing Fort McMurray to the north and south will pump out a combined 170,000 barrels a day. Expansion plans call for the total to climb in stages to 860,000 barrels daily – a volume greater than current production by global oil middle-rankers Oman, India or Malaysia.

The new oil sands generation stand out for more than sheer size. The plants have a special quality. It was described in jumbo type on a brochure circulated by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. when it began construction of Horizon’s 110,000-barrels-daily first stage, a $9.3 billion investment which employed up to 6,500 workers.

“World-leading, Alberta-born, Canadian,” declared the CNRL literature.

The Long Lake partnership of Nexen Inc. and OPTI Canada Inc. displayed similar pride when up to 2,000 workers began building the 60,000-barrels-daily first stage of their plant for a currently estimated $5.8-$6.1 billion.

“The sands just shifted,” the pair declared on the entry page to their project’s Internet site. Nexen acknowledged its international investment following by calling itself an “independent global energy company” instead of just Canadian. But the partnership conveyed the same message as CNRL.

Horizon and Long Lake represent a new stage of evolution for petroleum in general and the oil sands in particular. It is the dawn of made-in-Canada megaprojects conceived, planned and built from scratch by home-grown Alberta companies.

The pioneer plant, Great Canadian Oil Sands, only had 18-per-cent Alberta ownership because the premier, the late Ernest Manning, demanded a 1967 national centennial year minority share sale by Pennsylvania-based sponsor Sun Oil. The operation was 22 years old and well over its birth pangs by the time it was reorganized into a Canadian public company based in Calgary.

Syncrude’s current 56-per-cent Canadian ownership took decades of corporate and investment shuffles to evolve. The founders of the nation’s biggest production site – Imperial Oil, Cities Service, Gulf and Atlantic Richfield – were affiliates of global corporate heavyweights. The group sold interests of 10 per cent to Alberta, five per cent to Ontario and 15 per cent to Ottawa in exchange for them keeping the project alive. The provincial and federal governments rode the industry giants’ coat tails as investment supporters by adopting an orphan share left when Richfield abandoned the oil sands to go into Alaskan development instead.

A quarter-century after the Syncrude plant started up, the Athabasca Oil Sands Project began producing the third bitumen mega-mine in 2003 with Alberta-based Western Oil Sands holding 20 per cent. Takeovers have since turned the development into an entirely international affair by Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron and Marathon Oil.

But leaders of the new made-in-Canada projects were in no mood to drape themselves in maple-leaf flags and boast about nation-building industrial feats.

Where there should be rejoicing at the accomplishment of home-grown Alberta firms making a world-class boost in oil output, there is a dark cloud.

Horizon and Long Lake are coming on stream against a storm of criticism from international environmentalists – and Alberta followers – who raised a hue and cry branding the oil sands as “dirty oil.”

OPTI president Sid Dykstra wasted no time celebrating plant completion numbers. He is facing up to the environmental outcry. Dykstra is focused on making his firm the technology pioneer most likely to make the breakthrough of reducing the notorious oil sands carbon footprint.

As the bitumen upgrading half of the Long Lake partnership, OPTI is introducing a process with green industry potential known as gasification. The approach will enable conversion of oil sands production exhaust into a pure carbon-dioxide stream that can be readily captured and transported.

If waste gas greenhouse gas can be delivered, it can be used for reviving injections into aged conventional wells or stored deep underground in aquifers or in cavities in the earth created by past resource recovery projects.

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