New technology to mop up oil spills and clean water used in heavy oil recovery operations is being hailed by its makers as having huge potential for Alberta’s oilsands – and the environment.
Earth (Canada) Corporation showed off its wares last week in Calgary at a session hosted by the Petroleum Technology Alliance of Canada.
The Montreal-based firm has spent 18 months developing its TORR, or Total Oil Remediation and Recovery system. TORR can remove any substance that doesn’t dissolve in water, including hydrocarbons – leaving the water 99.9-per-cent clean, said Martin Plebon, vice-president of Earth (Canada).
“We’re looking for trial sites in Alberta to try the TORR out,” Plebon said in a presentation attended by several members of the oilpatch.
Jason Kropp, the Edmonton-based Western Canada representative for Earth (Canada), says a prototype TORR unit helped clean up more than 20,000 cubic metres of diesel heating oil at Tebacha College in Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories. The diesel oil had leaked from an underground tank into sandy soil and groundwater.
After the contaminated groundwater was put through the TORR unit, hydrocarbons could not be detected in the treated water, which was clean enough to dispose of in the town’s sewer system.
“Our impression of the technology is that it worked well,” said Richard Mercredi, regional superintendent of public works and services in Fort Smith.
The TORR unit was less bulky, easier and cheaper to ship to the town, and proved to be less costly than other clean-up systems considered, Mercredi said.
Kropp said that a huge potential application for the TORR technology is at Alberta oilsands projects that use steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) to recover tar-like heavy oil. SAGD involves injecting pressurized steam underground to force the oil out of rock formations and to the surface.
To make the steam, oilsands operators typically pipe in huge amounts of fresh water from a nearby river or lake, or tap groundwater from an underground aquifer.
But some landowners, especially in regions of Alberta affected by drought conditions, are objecting to proposed new SAGD operations because of the massive volumes of water they would consume.
Rancher Don Bester, who heads the Butte Action Committee which opposes using fresh water for oil production, recently told a University of Alberta water forum that companies are pumping 206 billion litres of water annually into oil-bearing formations. That volume would supply Red Deer, the province’s third-largest city, with water for 20 years, Bester noted.
Some SAGD operators have started building water-treatment plants onsite so they can recycle water.
But with TORR technology, operators could remove all the oil from the water being pumped to the surface and keep recycling the water, without building an expensive water-treatment plant, Kropp said. “SAGD is a really big opportunity for us.”
Alberta Energy Company (now EnCana Corp.) briefly tested a TORR unit last November at its pilot SAGD oilsands plant at Foster Creek in the Cold Lake air weapons range.
The heart of the technology is an absorbent polymer, a fibrous material made of several chemical compounds. In the prototype TORR machine, several layers of this absorbent material are installed in a row of horizontal chambers.
Water contaminated with oil droplets, oil and grease emulsions or other hydrocarbons is pumped into the machine, and the contaminants get sopped up by the successive layers of absorbent material.
Each layer captures and absorbs 14 times its weight in oil. Once saturated, the layer releases a globule of oil into a separate tank from which the oil is easily recovered.
Each layer can absorb and release oil at least 100 times over before it needs replacing, Kropp said. “Most of the oil is absorbed in the front part. Clean water comes out the back.”
The system is used along with off-the-shelf equipment to first remove large suspended particles in oily or greasy water prior to TORR treatment. Separate off-the-shelf equipment is also required to remove hydrocarbons that dissolve in water, such as benzene, at the final stage of treatment.
Even with the add-on equipment, operating costs for TORR are lower than other oil-and-water separation methods that use heat or chemicals, Kropp said. And the absorbent, once fully used, is an organic, non-toxic material that has been approved for recycling applications such as filler in making asphalt.
The performance claims for TORR have been independently certified by the federal Environmental Technology Verification Program.
The company’s prototype trailer-mounted machine, which can handle about 315 litres of oily water per minute, is available for rent. Earth (Canada) is building four more “one-off” units, each initially expected to cost between $80,000 and $100,000.
Plebon said the company wants to locate that facility in Alberta, because this is where the greatest demand is expected. Earth (Canada) plans to unveil its next generation of TORR – a high-pressure, vertical-column machine – at the Global Petroleum Show June 11-13 in Calgary.
