“Another thing we’re working on is injecting oxygen with in-situ steam generation,” enthuses Gates. “Why not inject oxygen with [less] steam to burn the residual fuel in the steam chamber – not to generate heat to reduce viscosity but to help generate steam.” He explains that some water can be injected, which along with any water already there vaporizes into steam underground. “In doing so, you also generate in-situ CO2 which flows in the reservoir so a large part of it stays in the ground.” So, not only is there a 25 per cent gain in a key benchmark of underground thermal oil sands separation known as the steam oil ration, or SOR, but also an emissions reduction of up to 50 per cent, not to mention a savings of up to 70 per cent in methane gas used in the process. “Overall quite remarkable,” says Gates.

He moves on to explain how thermal solvent injection can produce similar benefits. Injecting solvent with the steam raises the flow rate of the oil. Or, a similar technique to precondition the oil they’ve dubbed Brutus: “Instead of having solvent with the steam, we inject solvent a year before production. This solvent is actually water soluble but it prefers oil.” So, he says, the solvent slowly migrates into the oil and lowers its viscosity. “You can raise the flow rate by five times,” he says. “Nice thing about it is it stays in the oil zone away from aquifers. And you can see a one-third reduction in SOR.”

A longer term project in the planning stage involves helping nature along to obtain more efficient carbon recovery with less impact. “The formation of heavy oil is over geological time scales,” explains Gates. “You have bugs that convert what was really nice oil to crappy oil, but the product of that is a lot of CO2 and methane. What if you could accelerate that process by, say, a million times? You could take a heavy oil reservoir that’s no longer economic with 90 per cent oil left and have the microbes convert that to methane after about three months of stimulation.” He says you would actually feed the microbes a “miracle-grow” material to stimulate them to feed on the mineral. One feature of the biological production system that needs serious work, however, would be feeding the micro-organisms just the right amount so they wouldn’t get too carried away. “Right now they’re starving,” he says. “We have to feed them just enough so they’ll produce economic amounts of gas.”

Finally, there are smart wells. “These are basically wells that sense the chambers themselves and automatically redirect the action within the reservoir,” says Gates. “They see where the steam is not going as a result of the geology and direct more steam there.” Again, a 30 per cent saving in steam used is estimated to be available.

Gates’s projects are representative of just a part of what ISEEE’s role with CSEE will be, which is still sorting itself out. He says, however, that when it comes to the Alberta government’s pledge of $2 billion towards energy efficiency, the U of C will focus its expertise on those projects. “We’ll be putting armies of students and researchers on the industrial demo sites to help with testing and monitoring,” he says, “including social science, legal, jurisdictional and liability issues. They need someone to work on these things.” He says experts will also be brought in from other universities.

ISEEE’s priorities under CSEE evolve by the day. “There’s going to be some changes here yet,” says Layzell. “We’re looking for sponsorships, a governance model. And our primary goal working with CSEE is to get carbon management, the CMC initiative, off the ground.”

He says there are several more research programs in the wings, like an Arctic initiative. “Others will look at inner cities. How do you transform cities and make them sustainable? That’s part of our mandate too.” It’s not only efficient production of energy he says, but the use of it too.

“As we move forward, we will see new challenges,” says Carson. “This climate change issue isn’t going to be solved overnight so there will be a continuing role for seeing what research needs to be done. There will be a heck of a lot of evolving work.”

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