There's probably no way to evaluate the impact of Roger Butler's work in terms of hard dollars and cents.

But a longtime associate doesn't hesitate to share his own strong ideas on the enormous value of Butler's contributions to the oil and gas business.

"(Butler's) invention of steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) has had a staggering economic impact. It will eventually change the whole geopolitics of oil in the world," predicts Tom Harding, head of chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Calgary.

An engaging man with a whimsical sense of humour, Butler, who died last month, was all business in the laboratory. He commanded top dollar as one of Canada's premier petroleum engineers and was ultimately placed in charge of Imperial Oil's heavy oil research department in Calgary.

File photo by Shannon Oatway, Business Edge
Roger Butler displayed the first two bottles of crude oil to be taken from Imperial Oil's Cold Lake wells.

Eventually, he emerged from his lab with a revolutionary strategy for dredging profits from in situ oilsands by using steam injection and horizontal production wells.

Ironically, Imperial Oil never did buy into Butler's brainchild. Instead, senior management decided another recovery method, known as cyclic steam stimulation (CSS), was better suited to the unique geology of Imperial's heavy oil assets at Cold Lake.

Nevertheless, other major oilsands players have whole-heartedly embraced Butler's breakthrough technology. EnCana uses SAGD. So do Nexen, Petro-Canada, ConocoPhillips and Suncor Energy (at Firebag).

Most authorities tend to agree with Tom Harding, who points out by way of illustration that Canada possesses about 179 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, of which 175 billion remain locked within the Athabasca oilsands.

That includes 140 billion of in situ reserves, accessible only by means of SAGD and related methods.

"Let's say you could get roughly $10 a barrel, after costs, for producing those 140 billion barrels," Harding hypothesizes. "Those barrels today would represent a value of $1.4 trillion of pure profit."

Harding concludes by ranking Butler's contribution among the most significant in the history of the Canadian economy, "maybe even greater than the railway."

Clearly, the energy industry owes a significant debt to Butler's dogged persistence, as well as to his stubborn faith in his own calculations.

"Yes, the concept met a certain amount of initial resistance from established oil producers," Butler recalled during an interview this past March.

"They'd say, 'Roger, you can't put a steam well in, the steam will just blow out the bottom. Oh no, won't work. Silly idea.' " An Englishman who earned his PhD at London's Imperial College of Science and Technology, Butler immigrated to Canada in the 1950s to teach chemical engineering at Queen's University.

Shortly thereafter, he joined Imperial Oil Ltd. and got the inspiration for SAGD while examining methods of mineral extraction for a Saskatchewan potash mine almost 40 years ago.

He tinkered with a process of injecting water into deposits of potash and salt.

"Heavy brine falls to the bottom and the light water rises to the top," Butler outlines the procedure. "You end up with a turret-shaped cavity in which the heavy material keeps falling while the lighter water goes to the top."

As Butler worked through his potash theory using laboratory models, it occurred to him that a similar attack - replacing the water with steam injection - might work on the vast bitumen deposits Imperial had acquired near Cold Lake.

"Perhaps the steam will rise and the warm oil will fall," he theorized.

Much later, while the price of oil was climbing during the 1970s, Butler worked out a theoretical analysis of the process and ultimately decided his theory couldn't work in conjunction with traditional vertical wells.

In simplest terms, SAGD requires the injection of pressurized warm vapours, which create a "steam chamber" within the in situ deposit. Gravity then directs the oil toward the chamber's base.

"When you're extracting oil from in situ oilsands, the chamber (created by steam injection) is full of sand," Butler elaborated. "The oil has to move through the sand and gather on the bottom of the chamber ... but gravity won't assist the flow on a vertical well."

Answer: A horizontal well.

However, plans for a Cold Lake pilot project took ages to materialize, until a frustrated Butler stood up during a high-level meeting and exclaimed: "What the hell's the point of doing all this research if you fellas won't do something in the field?" Point made. A pilot was put in place and production turned out to be in complete accord with Butler's projections. In the end, however, Imperial Oil decision-makers opted for CSS.

After accepting a generous buyout from Imperial Oil in 1982, Butler further fine-tuned the SAGD process while working on behalf of the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA), which applied his methodology to a successful underground test facility near Fort McMurray.

Still later, Butler continued to tweak his brainchild after he was invited to join the U of C as chair of petroleum engineering. Toward the end of his life, he wound down a busy consulting business, but never stopped tinkering with SAGD theory.

Just three months ago in an interview, Butler acknowledged he was still trying to refine the process. Asked to share details, he winked mischievously and said: "Well, no ... I'm not going to tell you."

(Tom Keyser can be reached at keyser@businessedge.ca)