Basics of Oil and Gas | Zoom Webinar Recording

okay everyone it's ten o'clock so i think we're going to get started here before i introduce uh dan mclean who's the ceo of the ptrc i would just like to let people know kind of how this is working if you put your cursor to the bottom of your screen on zoom you will see there is a q a tab as well as a chat tab now the chat has been enabled only for attendees like yourselves to ask questions of the panelists you can't speak to one another you do that on zoom because you know there's been examples of people bombing zoom meetings and posting all kinds of weird things to people we don't want that happening so you can send questions to the panelists either through the chat room or you can do it through the q a at the bottom and and um you also there's no anonymous questions because we want to be able to follow up in case we don't get to your questions at the end of the webinar um the way this is structured four presentations will be given and then we're hoping to have about 15 minutes at the end to answer direct questions those questions will be uh from the written text and we will ask them for you so please if you have questions either put them into the chat or put them into the q a um we won't be opening up speaking for people that's just too much of a risk and with these kinds of numbers and we're already up to over 60 people attending and um it's it's important i think to uh to maintain some control over this so um we welcome all your questions and by the way there's also a raised hand feature in the chat don't bother using that i mean we will keep track of that so if someone raises their hand and they have a question it's just better to type in your question directly and we're making a list of those questions and hopefully we'll get to it if we don't we will respond as a written response to you after the webinar is over okay dan would you like to introduce yourself and the speakers yes thank you very much norm and welcome to everyone on this webinar thank you for taking the time of your very busy schedules uh to participate in this which seems to be the normal forum for communicating these days uh just a couple a couple of things at the beginning um you know we're in the throes of pandemic which is probably the single most important thing that affects all of our lives uh today and we're fully aware of that it affects our lives and how we work and but stuff still needs to get done and so uh we saw this as an opportunity to reach out to a large audience to to share with you some of the things that we do so before before i get going i wanted to say welcome to everyone welcome to folks uh across uh the province of saskatchewan i know we have folks from esteban wayburn uh and lloydminster in particular the office of the mayor of lloydminster welcome to you folks and uh we also have quite a reach into the rest of canada alberta and uh and other provinces and internationally we have folks from around the world and so welcome to all of you we hope that this will be interesting and maybe somewhat entertaining it is a very high level overview of some of the things we do but also about our industry here so before we get going i just want to tell you a little bit about the ptrc we've been around for well over 22 years we came together as a result of an arrangement with the province of saskatchewan and the federal government to support research in oil and gas we are also committed to supporting research organizations here in saskatchewan from the src and welcome to petro uh as well as the university of regina and university of saskatchewan we have basically three areas of research that we have been involved in over the years they are i like to refer to them as quite progressive in in nature we've been involved in this carbon capture utilization and storage uh category for quite some time in particular around co2 uh in uh early 2000s through till uh until 2016 we were the the lead research coordinator for everything related to the weyburn co2 eor project where we made sure that the co2 was in the ground doing what it was supposed to do we call it measurement monitoring and verification from there we went on to become the coordinator of all the research in aqua store aquastora is a co2 storage project connected to the boundary dam coal-fired power generation plant which has carbon capture on it and we're involved in that and we're also involved in heavy oil research in particular in the lloydminster area related to cold heavy oil production with sand we have researchers from saskatchewan and industry who support that activity so we've been around for quite some time in very very very many areas of research and we're looking forward to moving forward continually to being progressive ahead of the curve as it pertains to supporting the sustainability of this resource industry here in saskatchewan and in particular in reducing greenhouse gas emissions which is something that we have been involved in for quite some time so that's the ptrc i want to also introduce to you now the folks who are going to be speaking uh today uh starting with eric nichol who is our director of projects at ptrc we have petro nakutni from src he's here erica emery she's here uh is suzanne johnson is she going to be speaking also i can't remember uh nope okay well we've got uh two other folks from uh uh src uh matt nasaji and zinab mova headset they're also here and i'm gonna turn it back over to norm sakuta who is going to be our facilitator for all of this so thank you all for coming and i hope you enjoy this okay thank you dan so yes there is four presentations today i'll deal with that and their order right at the end of my short presentation mine is a real basic introduction that i'm going to talk about and then we will move on to the other three speakers uh in order so now i got to see if i can share my screen here there it is there we go can you all see that good okay so um this is just a real basic overview of uh oil and gas in saskatchewan as a matter of fact it really talks more about how things get started with oil and gas eric who's following me will be talking about the nitty-gritty of things like all wells and things like that but i'm just going to talk generally about what it takes to start the oil and gas exploitation or development industry in saskatchewan so first my outline so i'm going to provide some key definitions for oil and gas this isn't just going to be coming from me you're going to find these throughout the presentations from all four of our speakers today but i've got some particular ones that i want to tell you a bit about then i'm going to talk as i say about getting started i'm going to talk about what crown rights are and what land sales and leases are and then they're going to talk about freehold rights for minerals and for oil and gas in saskatchewan so that that way uh you're just aware of how it works in the province in terms of uh starting the production of oil then i'm going to talk about the benefits of oil and gas in saskatchewan a quick overview and then i'm going to talk about some of the challenges because of course with concerns about climate change happening uh across canada um the oil and gas industry has been a particular focus of that both of criticisms and of uh development so i'm gonna talk a little bit about that and so will our speakers after i've done a bit of an introduction so a few of the definitions first of all if you go to the ptrc page this is a link we can send this link out to people after the after the presentations are over we have a glossary of terms at the ptrc now we've been working on this for only about the last uh eight to ten months it's been populated with some good definitions right across the industry so if you ever have a question about a particular thing like a oil well or what is chops for example which is called heavy oil production with sand they will be included in this glossary so just make note of that you can go to the ptrc page that glossary will be world-class within a year i promise but right now we're populating it with some material and it's it's it's a good start so three of these definitions right off the bat are called upstream midstream and downstream oil and gas some of you may have heard these definitions in the past but i'm going to provide a better definition so upstream oil and gas is the idea of actually drilling the wells what happens at the wellhead what happens in the field to get the oil and gas out of the ground so when we talk about upstream oil and gas we're talking about the aspects of the industry that are about exploration about production recovery uh from reservoirs so that's upstream oil and gas midstream oil and gas you could consider to be although it's some other things the transportation of materials so how you get that to market you might even say that um big tankers going across the ocean pipelines that's midstream oil and gas how do you get that to locations where it can then be further refined and upgraded so that's what downstream oil and gas is it's the refining to finished products and frankly the sale of those products so when we're talking about upstream midstream and downstream oil and gas which is often talked about right across the industry and in the general public those are the three things that we're talking about um the ptrc and i would say src are most heavily involved with upstream oil and gas although src because they're interested in pipe flow and in improving the abilities of pipelines to do what they're supposed to are also involved in a significant way with midstream oil and gas so definitions as well ooip sometimes you'll see this used quite a bit it's actually original oil in place that when you discover a reservoir so i'm going to use the example the wayburn field for this when the wavenfield was first discovered in the 1950s and they did all the characterization they looked at at all the seismic records and and and were able to determine how much role was down there the original oil in place was 1.4 billion barrels now that's a great reservoir that's a lot of oil it's a world-class reservoir and this is in southern saskatchewan since 1958 i believe or maybe 54 i've got my dates mixed up they've started to produce oil from this reservoir of the 1.4 billion barrels in place now when we talk about reserves that's the number of barrels of oil that you could get out of that reservoir given existing technology so just because there's 1.4 billion barrels in place there that doesn't mean that the reserves are 1.4 billion barrel what are the reserves well at weyburn it's been variable initially they thought they could get about 350 million barrels out and as a matter of fact by the year 2000 they'd gotten around 300 million barrels out of the reservoir but it wasn't until enhanced oil recovery came around that they got beyond that now ever since uh co2 has been used at the wavering field they've gone well past the initial 300 million uh barrels of oil coming out of there and right now they're sitting at about 500 million barrels that's because of co2 being used in the reservoir so when we talk about recovery rate which is the third term here that's the number of barrels that have been recovered versus the amount that's in the reservoir so right now we're talking about a 36 recovery rate at weyburn around 36 now what is enhanced or recovery and this is something that's going to be covered off by the next two presenters by both eric and petro but a brief summary is that it's it's technologies that come on stream that are used to continue to produce oil from that reservoir and it's thought that at weyburn at the very minimum we might get another 200 million barrels because of those new technologies which means we are approaching or will be surpassing 50 recovery from the wavering field that's very possible that is amazing recovery a lot of our reservoirs are lucky if you get five ten twenty percent of the oil in place because it's you know pressures drop you're just not able to get oil any more oil out of the reservoir so wavering has become a really world-class field that is being looked at and and i used it to basically provide examples of what these terms mean for you if you're interested in looking them up further okay so let's talk about crown rights and ownership so basically the government or crown as it's called so the provincial government of saskatchewan owns the mineral rights rights to the vast majority of locations on the province about 80 percent of the mineral rights so that is what is underground below your land is owned by the saskatchewan government now that doesn't just include oil and gas that includes potash increasingly really valuable commodities like lithium the province is looking more and more at lithium because of course those are used in batteries to power cars things like that and they are finding that there's lithium in some of the underground reservoirs where oil and gas is or where there's deep saline reservoirs that's also being talked about there's also helium that's another commodity that's underground and we actually have a helium production plant now in southwest saskatchewan because they were able to find helium in some of these underground locations now as i've said most of those rights are owned by the province and the province decides to do what's called land leases and sales and what they do is they make public offerings or notices that are posted at the ministry of the environment site that says this particular section of the province or this particular area is now up for lease or up for sale for exploitation that is if they haven't already um put it up for sale or released what happens then is usually larger companies it's hard if it involves oil and gas for it to be a smaller company to do these kinds of bids makes a bid and says we want to purchase the rights to exploit this particular resource in that area and we're willing to pay this amount of money the top bidder usually wins um as i've said if it involves oil and gas or a large area that requires a lot of infrastructure or pipelines or pump jacks eventually it will be a larger company that doesn't mean that obviously smaller companies can't make bids if it's smaller parcels of land and that certainly has happened now when that's sold the rights to exploit that there is a limited time for that company after they've paid the money to the saskatchewan government to be able to exploit that resource if they don't do it within let's say there's different windows but two to five years the rights go back to the province and they're able to put it back up for sale again because the company was not successful in being able to actually exploit it so these land sales and leases are handled if you're interested in how this works you can visit this website that's here at the bottom i will also send this link to people provides a lot of valuable information about how it works so royalties that's another thing that comes out of this so aside from selling the land leases to companies the oil that gets produced from these when the oil starts to flow also because it's owned by the province you these companies have to pay royalties to the province now what percentage of royalty is paid and that's where this document here kind of sets out some of the rules for that and it's variable and it's always changing because oil that comes out of the heavy oil reservoirs is harder to get out of the ground there's less of it that comes out the royalty rates for that might be less than an oil field like weiburn where it's a medium crude it's easier to get it out of the ground and a royalty rate as high as 18 to 20 percent of the value of that oil might be paid to the government a much smaller you can have with horizontal wells that have been drilled into some of the formations like the bakken which are very expensive wells usually the government will allow a very low royalty rate until that capital expenditure has been paid uh back to the to the um through through oil sales to the particular company that did the well so you might only have a one percent royalty rate but as soon as that well is paid for the royalty rates go up to like 15 20 so let's say an average for the province might be between 10 and 20 royalty rate which is paid into the coffers of the provincial government on the basis of sales of the oil that gets exploited from those reservoirs so what's freehold rights about 17 of the oil and gas and other mineral rights that are owned in the province are owned by individual landowners and those are freehold rights so for example if you've ever been down to estevan or to wayburn and there's a farmer who looks really wealthy with his property and his you know huge house it may be that that farmer owns the mineral rights under his property and so when the oil and gas has been exploited even though the sale of that particular region is handled by the government and the company that is determined to go in and do that is also determined by the government that company still has to pay royalty rights to the landowner that owns the minerals underneath it if they own the mineral rights so that's the first thing and i mean if you're a oil and gas producer and uh sorry uh owner and you're a landowner you might get one to four percent uh of the value of the oil under your property and if you're producing thousands of barrels a month that can be a lot of money coming into your coffers simply by allowing a company to come in and exploit it so that's what individual landowners and freehold uh rights are about there's also a second kind of right and it's here for payment for surface rights so even if you don't own the mineral rights underneath your property you are still able to ask if the oil company wants to come in and put a well on your property you're able to ask for a yearly rate for renting that service and that is paid by all companies to every uh landowner who has um parts of their land disrupted by having an oral well there um and that that again that fee can vary widely um and it really is dependent upon um how many wells are on the property how much land is being used and what the production is from those particular wells some of them aren't going to be producing very well so you might not make very much for for service rights and by the way a landowner who doesn't own mineral rights can choose not to have any access to a surface rights there can be some challenging of that on the part of the oil company if they really feel they need to have access to that land but that is usually moderated by the government at a tribunal that they would hold between the company and the land owner but um landowners can refuse if they want to have access to uh to their properties so so one of the benefits for saskatchewan of oil and gas well there's some basic ones and these are also available at that website that i noticed that i put at the bottom of the previous page that in this 2019 there was a trailing off of oil and gas production a bit because of the prices falling and because of other issues so there was 180 million barrels of oil produced in saskatchewan and 200 or 2019 the value of that was around 10.5 billion dollars the prices fluctuated widely over the course of the year so that's a rough estimate uh but there is a line item in the budget for 2019 that indicates 691 million dollars was provided in royalties to the province now just for context because there's other mineral rights coming in for potash you know even for lithium i don't know probably not much for lithium at the moment but potash provided 619 million in the same year so those two resources and the payment of royalties brought in about 1.2 billion dollars for the saskatchewan government there's also 32 500 people in 2019 directly employed in oil and gas and by directly we mean people on rigs people directly involved with trucking in relation to those sites people in offices and lloydminster who might be working for husky direct employment was 32 500 in saskatchewan but there's also significant benefits of indirect employment and for this i'll just mention that the ptrc although the way the aquastore project is not about oil and gas exploitation when we go down to do well work or when we go down to do monitoring or measurement in the estevan area we're often using local industries like accommodations like food clothing supply companies even other kinds of trucking we've even rented snowmobiles down there so those kinds of spin benefits are also a part of the benefits of oil and gas in saskatchewan so what are the challenges and these are significant challenges and the reason i'm putting them here is because in many ways our three speakers after me are going to be talking about these because they are challenges for the industry the first is of course greenhouse gas emissions during the production of oil and gas so aside from what might get produced in terms of co2 emissions from the burning of oil or from gasoline and those things the production of oil and gas also can produce a number of emissions so for example when you're using steam assisted gravity drainage which is one of the methods of injecting steam into heavy oil at depth in order to get the oil to move back to the surface you have to burn natural gas or some other source in order to produce the steam at the surface that goes underground so the co2 emissions from that process are part of the overall emissions footprint of oil and gas so that's an issue can we eliminate sag d or can we at least reduce its effects that's one of the things that ptrc is looking at methane emissions fugitive emissions they're sometimes called from oil and gas production those are an issue and methane as erica is going to describe is a much more difficult uh problem and also a much more demanding problem in the oil and gas industry because the effects of methane are much more profound in co2 land disturbance so what we're trying to do at ptrc is one of our pro many of our projects is to really optimize the amount of oil you get out of a single well if that well runs dry you have to drill another one which means more weld disturbance so if we can help optimize wells then we'll have less land disturbance less need to produce and then finally water use and that includes the injection of water which is a common process into wells in order to increase the pressure within them often the injection of water isn't from surface locations but from salt and water they're called aquifers at depth um which you then pump up and inject into the reservoir so um and where you are using surface water to eliminate that entirely would be the ultimate goal i think to but rather to use water that's used at depth and at other locations and of course you don't want any of that very salty water being spilled at the wellhead so that's another issue that is potentially to be looked at so that's it for me and just brief summary of what's coming up with the presentations eric nichols can be doing the basics about wells how they're drilled what's an oil reservoir where are oil and gas located and also touching upon enhanced door recovery we have petro he's going to be talking about eor enhanced recovery and ior which is improved oral recovery and also a number of definitions and other background information and information on the research that's being conducted at src and finally we have erica she's going to be talking about methane and the research work that's being done at src to help mitigate some of those emissions and it also kind of a summary about why methane is a particular problem so with that i'm going to stop sharing and eric please go ahead and start with your presentation thank you very much norm i hope everyone can see my screen i'm going to talk about uh a little more of the technical stuff than than what norm was talking about that was a good a good background thank you very much norm consider this sort of continuing to drink from the fire hose on all things oil and gas in saskatchewan so i'm going to go through some petroleum geology basics of porosity reservoirs fluids within them and and where the reservoirs are in saskatchewan how you drill an oil well and what that looks like in cross-section also reservoir depletion and eor i'll touch on eor petrol is going to really get into it a little bit deeper so reservoir rock you know we often talk about rock i'm a geologist by training i grew up looking at rocks and and talking about rocks there's different kinds as it pertains to a to a petroleum geologist there's the kind that has no pore spaces real heavy um dense rock think of a curling rock or something like that but more likely a shale something that fluids can't travel through but then you have this the porous and permeable rock and that's what you have oil and gas trapped in if we were to take that little diagram and put it on its side and put oil down here what you would have is basically an oil reservoir you have rock that is connected poor spaces and porous and permeable like a sponge right underneath real dense heavy rock what does this look like in reality this is a core of a limestone that has these big porous holes in it it looks like it looks like swiss cheese although it also may look like a sandstone that all the spaces between the grains of sand are all filled with oil some of you may be old enough to remember this this is this is a jed clampett out one day shooting for some food not through the ground came the bubble and crude not really the way things actually work nor when we talk about an oil pool i know that's our that's our definition of this and we shouldn't be calling it an oil pool many of you maybe think of an oil pool is this pool sitting in a cave underground that we stick a pipe in like a straw in your slurpee and suck it out of the ground unfortunately no that's not that easy either what we do have when when we have an oil gas reservoir are the interplay in the and the and the interconnectedness of those different types of rocks so think of this piece of rock here as that swiss cheese rock that real permeable stuff and this is that real dense rock but what you would have is is fluids sometimes oil and gas um flowing up through these through these rocks and finding themselves trapped in a position uh like this under what's called an anticlinal fold but in different ways oil and gas can be trapped in these in these rocks and that's what we look for in saskatchewan um so to to access that we have to drill an oil well and at its most basic i could get into all these terms but but really what you need to know about an oil well is that you drill a well and you cement a metal pipe into it and then you drill a little bit smaller and you cement another pipe into it called the surface casing then possibly an intermediate casing and then production casing each one is a pipe inside a pipe inside a pipe each one getting progressively deeper and each one using a lot of cement so if you've ever wondered why cement companies are so important to the oil and gas industry that's why at the end of it when you have this oil well drilled deeply into the earth this is not to scale at all this could be you know up to ten thousand feet or three thousand meters deep what you would do is go down here and then use what's called a perforating gun to perforate a hole into the side of this casing so that the oil can flow into the oil well and it won't flow up to surface usually especially in saskatchewan you need to have a pump and a pump runs on a big long uh you know you've seen these nodding donkeys in the field a lot but what you have to know is that there's a what's called a sucker rod that goes all the way to the bottom of this well which might be kilometers deep it's a very long rod and at the bottom is a valve that allows you to start slowly and gradually bringing up oil to the surface where the gas is separated right basically at the wellhead and you have oil production so very many pipes and very many long pieces of steel as i'm sure you've seen in the yards and on the trucks around estevan and lloydminster insert current where are the where is the oil in saskatchewan well it you know it's all in these special places where we have those traps those the special position of rocks where oil can can trap and where that happens to be is in estevan uh the shaunovan formation in sort of current uh the viking formation in the in the kindersley area and heavy oil up near lloydminster of course a whole bunch to the west of us and alberta as well but what we have here you know petroleum geology at its most basic is we're looking for these sort of wedges of sedimentary rocks those rocks that could be porous like sponges sitting on top of what you know as the pre-cambrian shield if you've ever been to the lakes up near the runs or something you see a lot of rocks at surface that's the shield the shield goes very deep underneath us here in regina and between us and the shield is thousands of meters of porous or non-porous rock that we look for traps in so as the oil well we drill it and it starts producing that's really great this is an example from a place called steelman in southeast saskatchewan and it's a field that's currently owned by cnrl i think it was has been for a long time uh it was first drilled in 1954 if you look at this production graph and and immediately production started going very high and by by the mid 1960s uh that field was producing over 20 000 barrels of oil a day really good must have been really nice there in the 60s lots of money coming in and all that but in a very predictable and steady way we see oil fields and and sometimes individual oil wells start to dry up or decline in a very predictable way and with this very characteristic shape of the curve as we get up to 2016. also at the same time as that this blue line represents the production of water and i just superimpose this upon it as an estimate but but towards the end of the of the field's life you'll see that it produces much much much more water than it does oil and the company becomes an oil a water handling company more than they are an oil company and the price per barrel of water is not very good so all of this water gets pumped back down into different wells and trying to get more oil out in southeast saskatchewan we maybe get 20 to 30 percent of the original oil in place if you remember that term that norm told you but it can be as little as five to ten percent so imagine 95 of the oil remaining in this reservoir what can we do of that and it's typical of many fields in saskatchewan be they bakken fields or or up near lloydminster and heavy oil so we're leaving 95 up to 95 of it behind here's weyburn weyburn had a very similar history uh steady production inclined to the mid 60s uh and almost 50 000 barrels a day and then there's this very predictable decline again but they did something different they they put in infill wells so that can that can get you a little more production they they started to do horizontal drilling and that was a big technology that i was involved in in the earliest days in the mid 90s to drill horizontal wells at weiburn and that increased production but most importantly what they did was enhance oil recovery using co2 and that's all this part here and right by now although this graph is a little old they're they're producing oil at a rate not seen since the mid 1970s and uh helping the environment while they do it so we're going to get into a little more detail on that what is enhanced oil recovery so when the field has declined and it's not producing much anymore you'll set you would have a setup of injection wells and production wells and and petro's going to get into much more detail about this but you might want to inject water into that injection well and push more oil towards a production well that's the cheapest most basic if you want the water to be a little bit thicker you could add a polymer to it and that makes it more efficient uh the sweep you could add a surfactant and that's a fancy industrial term for soap and soap just like it does on your dishes it will clean grease out of an oil out of a reservoir in the same way co2 eor would be something under gases and solvents so you inject a gas maybe methane maybe co2 maybe a combination of them it changes the composition of the oil to make it thinner and run up to the production well better you can use heat related technologies like steam you've heard of sag d and probably have seen those big steam generators near lloydminster that thins the oil and and uh creates better surface tension and surface tension is is a term that petrol will go into a little more detail also you can inject things like oxygen in there and light the thing on fire and essentially um burn the reservoir to drive hot oil towards the production well lots of things like this but it has to be economic and it has to be done economically and in a way that optimizes production and doesn't harm the environment but in fact improves it we talk a lot about co2 at the ptrc and and we talk about tons of co2 as they are captured from either the boundary dam power plant but they can also be captured from cement plants or fertilizer plants or ethanol plants and what is a ton of co2 look like well a ton is about a ton of co2 is about the size of your house or the size of a small house a 27 foot cube of co2 is is a ton you and your family and me and my family most of us here will create about seven to eight tons of co2 per year just as our natural footprint but we can take that co2 if we can capture some of the co2 that we use from power for example at the boundary down power plant we can start to use that to inject into an oil reservoir one ton of co2 at weyburn creates three extra barrels of oil beyond what we would have gotten otherwise now you're saying okay but those barrels of oil create more co2 how does that work yes indeed they do each barrel will will have about 400 um one half a ton about uh 400 kilograms of co2 when it's refined and used but this is a much lower intensity than any other oil produced and and this is a fairly complicated calculation but one that makes sense and if you're interested in more detail on this i encourage you to google azalena 2016 wrote a paper called how green is my oil which which sort of ranks the different production methods as to their carbon intensity and co2 eor is one of the lowest intensity methods of improving oil recovery uh the exist one of the benefits of it is that the existing infrastructure the wells and tanks and all of that can be used we don't need to drill that many extra wells we don't need to disturb more land a fraud capital is high though uh on this and and it's a very serious calculation to make when you enter into a co2 eor scheme is it going to pay off in the long run and often payoff isn't isn't for years it's a big problem that we have to solve this is a map of oil wells in the lloydminster area lloydminster is right in the middle here and oil wells you can see there's thousands of them each little dot represents an oil well black ones are abandoned those are the ones that are no longer producing anymore and they've been filled with cement and closed off and cut off below the plow depth of whatever field they were on the green ones are great they're producing they're continuing to drive our economy the red ones are a little scary and there's a lot of them they're suspended the oil companies have decided to shut them in uh basically not produce them because it's not economic right now and they can't get any more oil out of them but they are there and they're waiting to access that extra 95 percent of oil if we can do it and one of the ways we're looking to do that is with co2 so some of the takeaways from my presentation don't think of oil pools as underground lakes think of them as sponges of uh of rock um oil wells can be complicated things think uh a lot of cement and a lot of tubes inside of tubes and and highly technological things production oil production declines pretty in a pretty predictable way and we're here to try to keep that from happening we can do that with enhanced oil recovery using co2 which can help satisfy some greenhouse gas goals while helping our economy and protecting the industry many wells in the province are ready to use this but it has to be economic and and it has to be made economic and we're looking for ways to do just that so going into a little bit more detail will be uh petra nakutni uh who's going to speak right now so i'll now turn it over to petro good morning everybody can you see my presentation okay so uh as eric introduced you to some of the basic concepts and he spoke about some of the er methods um i will uh i will get a little more in detail i'll try not to bore you with too much detail i tend to get excited about these things which my wife does not understand but uh it's a chance for me to introduce more general audience to some of the concepts before i get into uh enhanced oil recovery i just wanted to introduce a couple more terms and the first term is oil and gas reserves so what i wanted to point out here is canada uh has uh second or third largest reserves of oil in the world and so we're sitting on a tremendous resource here that that we can you know be we can use to our benefit and to the benefit of people around the world and there is a lot of signs that that goes into oil recovery um another term that i wanted to introduce you to is recoverable reserves so just because we have the oil under the ground does not mean that it can be produced easily so the oil in place is always much higher than what is uh technically feasible to recover and that's even yet higher than what is economically feasible so as eric mentioned before sometimes up to 95 percent of uh oil stays in the ground that's because it's either technically or economically unfeasible to uh to recover and so at src and uh as well as universities and many other researchers in canada we are trying to find ways to recover that oil while reducing the environmental impact so there are three different main stages of oil recovery and again you have seen that on eric's slides for vapor field and others when we just starting to produce oil from particular field we call that primary production so that is done by using natural natural energy of the reservoir we drill a valve and sometimes there's enough pressure that the wheel comes out on its own most of the time especially in canada we have to pump it out but we do not need to inject or do anything else about the reservoir so it's basically just stuck in the oil out of that sponge that eric was talking about and again we can get up to thirty percent of oil and the best case scenario but more often it's more like five to ten percent um second step is again what's been done a lot in saskatchewan in canada in the world is secondary uh second recovery we're injecting water to maintain pressure and change that that oil out and then once that's exhausted uh when they produce mostly water we go to tertiary where we try to do something different such as injecting soap or heating the reservoir again to produce even more oil so why this is important well again eric talked about significant decline in production a lot of fields in saskatchewan are mature a lot of wealth is suspended right now for example for buckin most of the production is through primary and we keep on drilling new valves but even though the the number of valves is going up uh this orange line the production started to decline uh so uh the problem is not only leaving oil in the ground but also you know having to drill more wells so what can be done about that well there are several ways you can try to improve production by optimizing the current existing pumps you know pumping methods drilling methods like drilling longer wells horizontal wells drilling more valves from one pad which minimizes land disturbance but it could also inject different fluids or energy into the reservoir which would then constitute enhanced early recovery and again that could be gas could be chemicals could be steam uh even microbes a couple of things before that i wanted to mention about primary depletion you again would have heard us use the term cold caviar production stand so what this is is that we allow some sand to be produced from the reservoir some reservoirs are not very consolidated so when you produce oil you get some sand out and that creates these conduits that are called wormholes because that's uh you know they look like that they can be up to 100 meters long and a few centimeters in diameter and that allows us to access oil from further away but it also makes it more difficult to produce oil at the end of primary and another another method that you've probably heard about is introducing fractures that is injecting water most often it's water and sand and creating small fractures around your injection and production valves and that allows you to access the reservoir and that is usually done in very consolidated rocks so they're look almost like a granite countertop that you cannot get the oil out of it other ways so what are the some of the enhanced solar recovery uh how we can produce more oil from existing wells again because that would be an ideal scenario we don't have to drill more wells uh minimize land disturbance and uh use the reserves resource that we have so one way is to again inject uh something to displace soil out that could be water could be co2 or other gas the problem is that the oil oil and water don't mix very well if you ever try to make salad dressing you know that you have to shake it very hard for it to mix and uh then it settles out anyway and that is because of this phenomenon is called interfacial tension uh here you can see this uh little bug on the water uh you know the reason it can can walk on the water is because of interfacial tension phenomena and another uh so the way we can deal with that is by adding some soap or reducing or add in actually something like baking soda because that reacts to the oil and uh that creates a soap in situ co2 can actually dissolve in oil and in some conditions it can remove interfacial tension and yet another way of producing more oil is uh to reduce oil viscosity and that could be done by increasing temperature injecting solvent such as hydrocarbon solvent or again co2 can do that and then we can also try to improve permeability of the reservoir by fracking or doing some acid treatments or sun production so you you've seen in my previous slide and also generic presentations that you talk a lot about too and that is not only because we we want to reduce the environmental impact by putting tutti in the reservoir but also because co2 is actually pretty good in uh recovering oil and again wavering field is one of the good examples the reason it's good at recovering oil is that uh it can dissolve in oil and swell it if you ever opened the in a pop bottle after it's been shaken you would know that it introduces a lot of energy and then what can happen in the reservoir too when she injects you to pressurize it and then basically open the bottle it can all come out both co2 and the oil also some co2 will stay in the ground and and again there are different ways of uh introducing co2 it depends on pressure and temperature so there are two main two main processes that could be used with gas or water to add energy to the reservoir one is cyclic co2 or gas injection where we inject then dissolve and reproduce in this case we produce bags uh majority of co2 that's injected but then it can be re-injected one more time and at the end of the process it will stay in the ground uh the flooding process is a continuous flight and where we inject in one well and produce from the other and in this way we can store more in the ground because you cannot produce majority of the gas and that's what what is being done in wayburn and other places so thermal processes so a lot of oil in saskatchewan is very heavy you can see this image on the right top of my screen it uh the oil does not flow very well it's almost like molasses and in fact some of the oil is really heavy at room condition it looks like bitumen it's a paste it will not flow so we have to warm it up in order to be able to produce it and uh typically that's currently being done by steam and you've uh again you would have seen some of the boilers and perhaps you've heard about steam assisted gravity drainage so what a lot of research is going into right now is how to reduce the amount of steam or amount of energy that we need to add to generate steam because most of the steam is generated by burning natural gas and of course that produces emissions so one way is to uh co-inject the flue gas to the co2 that's produced during steam generation into the reservoir and another way is to replace some of the steam with solvent or another gas and that again could be co2 could be hydrocarbon and there's a lot of different processes that are being developed in order to to do that um several companies have already been able to reduce the emissions by more than 80 percent um so the industry is moving towards this and again we have several research institutes including src that's looking into accelerating that so this is what a steam chamber looks like you can inject through one well and it rises up and then it drains down and you produce oil so what else uh well there's a lot of other innovative ideas there nanoparticles microbial electrical heating i already mentioned down called steam generators using geothermal energy a variety of hybrid hybrid processes or even generating hydrogen in situ you can actually break the oil down into hydrogen and other gases and then produce only hydrogen and that's what proton energy is trying to do right now so there is a lot that can be done and a lot of uh bright minds are are looking into this uh in saskatchewan um so just uh this is my last slide so if you were to uh you know to set out to uh design an effective ur process and reduce environmental impact so how would you do that well again it's important to be able to use existing wells and design a process that can produce more oil from existing valves existing fields so you don't waste that again use solvents instead of heat sometimes you can also use chemical additives that reduces the amount of steam and amount of energy that you need to input if you have to produce co2 uh inject co2 in the reservoir that could be co2 regenerate or co2 from a chemical plant or from a power plant again that's what's been done in boundary dam and understand the reservoir in the process through uh geomodeling laboratory modeling and simulation and on the screen here you see some of the examples of the physical models that we do that we use at src to try to understand the reservoir test the processes and accelerate development of new ideas such that they could be used in the next uh in a few months or years to to reduce the impacts and maintain oil production in saskatchewan so that's it for me thank you for tuning in okay uh erica we'd like you to go next i'm just gonna step in for a second and just say to people uh erica's presentation will probably take us to the end of the time uh but we will hang around to answer about four or five of the questions that have been sent to us electronically anybody who can't stay past 11 o'clock we will send uh answers to these questions as well as listing the questions provided individuals who ask them are willing to have us do that to you via email so go ahead erica thanks okay thank you norm so i'm erica emory i'm with the saskatchewan research council and as norm mentioned we are here at the last portion of the presentation i'm going to briefly touch on methane regulations i think in the interest of time i will actually skim through those very quickly and we'll talk a little bit about why methane is the focus for oil and gas and some different mitigation strategies so methane regulations are both federal and provincial federal regulations are through the ministry of environment and climate change canada the big takeaway here is that they have a goal of reducing methane emissions from 40 to 45 below 2012 levels greenhouse gas pollution pricing act was induced introduced in 2018 and that is the carbon tax that i'm sure you're all aware of it started at ten dollars a ton uh it's increasing sorry started at twenty dollars per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent is increasing by ten dollars per year to hit fifty dollars per ton in 2022 and there was a recent announcement in the news about the intention to increase that price even further in november it was also announced that saskatchewan alberta and bc have all reached equivalency agreements on provincial methane regulations so the regulations of those provinces applies in place of the carbon the federal regulations saskatchewan's regulations are put forward in the methane action plan part of prairie resilience climate change strategy the oil and gas emissions management regulations ogomar is the program and we can send out a link to that if anyone wants more information again the main takeaway is the goal to reduce methane emissions in the oil and gas industry by 40 percent between 2020 and 2025. uh it sets a specific target of 4.5 million tons of co2 equivalent annually and there are uh phase-in starting in january 2020 increasing requirements year-on-year it's a result results-based standard there is no option to not comply with this standard it's something that you must do to operate also as part of saskatchewan's emissions regulations there's the output-based performance standard which applies not just to oil and gas but to all large emitters in the province and i am going to just move quickly past that and start talking about methane you might wonder why i'm focusing so much on methane when this is the emissions reduction talk uh well methane is part of oil and gas production so as eric and norm showed you in their presentations an underground reservoir contains that oil but it also contains water and it also contains natural gas the amount of each one is dependent on the formation the age geology history a lot of factors that we're not really going to go into but the important thing to know is when you're producing that oil you're not just producing oil you are also producing the water and the gas natural gas or produce gas in saskatchewan is mainly methane there can be a little bit of other contaminants in it so there's sometimes there's going to be carbon dioxide there's going to be some higher hydrocarbons there might be some h2s or sour gas key sources for emissions from oil and gas production there's several of them and they have varying degrees of importance you may have heard of stock about fugitives fugitives are an unintentional leak that it's coming out somewhere along the process that perhaps the producer is not aware of there's also production venting which is something that the producer is aware of so they're producing this gas and they're separating it and they're either venting it or flaring it they know that gas is there there's also venting from pneumatic devices so um instrumentation some different valves operate using compressed gas to open and close and those will all vent gas as part of their normal operation they're venting from compressor rods there's also venting associated with fracking let's come back around to why methane methane has a global warming potential of 25 times that of carbon dioxide and uh i won't spend too much time on that we'll move right on to what can we do about it well if you think back i mentioned there's several different sources of methane and they'll have different mitigation strategies depending on your source when we're looking at fugitives or those unintentional leaks you want to apply leak detection and repair there's different methods of doing leak detection and repair because methane is a gas it's difficult to detect just from walking around and looking but there are fixed gas sensors that you can install there are optical gas imaging cameras that you can send out with an operator into the field and use the special camera to see where the methane is leaking you can also attach sensors to mobile technologies such as on a truck or on a drone a picture here in the corner is a test that src did with an unmanned aerial vehicle holding some different sensor packages so you can fly that over your site and do a survey of where those leaks are coming from and satellite surveys are also being offered now but that takes care of the fugitives pneumatics as i mentioned emit gas as part of their normal regulate operation there are things you can do about that there is replacing your higher bleed pneumatics with newer lower bleed pneumatics you can also go to electric operation on your site so that you don't need to use pneumatic valves anymore you're using electric valves electric actuators compressors same thing it's a known source of leaks it's a relatively small source of leaks new compressors are being designed to reduce that leakage and you can do regular maintenance on your compressors to reduce that leakage so the main thing that we haven't talked about yet is the methane that's produced as part of your oil production that that you could be venting or flaring right down so the normal methane that comes up out of the ground with the oil and the gas and um what are our options for that well you can capture or convert do something with that methane the first option that everyone thinks about is conservation is there a way to capture that gas and sell it there are options there's compressors there's natural gas pipelines there's virtual virtual pipeline where you capture the gas and compress it and transport it by truck or by rail uh there's vapor recovery units there's also enhanced oil injection enhanced oil recovery by re-injection several advantages for these options emissions are almost completely eliminated as i mentioned there are still you know compressor packing for example if you're compressing it and injecting it into a pipeline you'll still lose a little bit for fugitives and compressor but you're no longer venting another advantage the gas has value you can sell it it can be used to heat homes it can be used industrially disadvantages often transportation costs are too high so if you are operating your well and it's producing gas but you're a long way away from any existing pipelines to build that infrastructure to build that pipeline for a long long distance to connect to existing infrastructure is going to cost more than the value of the gas that you can sell and as we looked at two the production decline curves are such that if you drill your well and you find you're producing a lot of gas by the time you build up this other infrastructure your gas production might have dropped off another popular option for dealing with methane is the combustion or flare gas flaring the gas it can be done with a flare and incinerator enclosed combustor catalytic combustors so there's there's different options here but they all accomplish the same goal which is to burn the gas this doesn't really seem like a good mitigation option but if you think back to that 25 to 1 ratio of the global warming potentials it it does help from an emission standpoint because you're converting higher emission methane into the lower global warming potential carbon dioxide combustors flares incinerators are fully commercial they're available they're out there right now they're 99 efficient in general can be quite low cost and they can handle ranges of gas across the way so if you have a clean high methane gas or if you have a contaminated gas it will still burn um some of the main disadvantages is that you're not producing anything you're just burning the gas to get rid of it and a lot of the regulations that are coming out are specific to venting but some of them are mentioning venting and flaring so it's not necessarily something that will be able to continue long into the future so if you can if you don't want to burn your gas and you can't connect to existing pipeline or infrastructure what are some other options you can convert it and converting to power is one that has been gaining a lot of interest lately src has done some work on this in the past and is currently involved in a study right now there's a lot of different options technology wise when it comes to converting gas to power there's combined heat and power engine generator sets that you've probably experienced in other areas and then there's smaller scale versions of things that exist in large scale like a micro turbine compared to a regular steam turbine organic rankine cycle thermoelectric generators there's also emerging technologies that i didn't really mention on here such as uh fuel cells some advantages you are producing a saleable product you're producing power which you can either use to offset your own power use on site or potentially tie into a grid depending on the location these gas to power technologies tend to be relatively small they're scalable down to individual wells in some cases or into multi-well batteries in other cases as i mentioned it's generally familiar technology engines generators these are things that our operators know how to deal with there are some disadvantages often they require some kind of gas pre-treatment the gas has to have a minimum heat content a minimum pressure they can't handle contaminants and of course cost is going to be the the story throughout this disadvantages of all the technologies we can also convert gas into liquids there are several different processes converting gas to liquids it can be converted into longer hydrocarbon chains so into a fuel like diesel or like gasoline or like jet fuel it can also be converted into completely other chemicals methanol dimethyl ether ammonia formaldehyde and they all have different processes but they have some similarities they all produce liquid fuels or chemicals which can generally use existing infrastructure so if you're already pumping oil away from your oil well and you can produce more oil or more gasoline gasoline or more diesel then that's quite easy to handle and deal with most of these not all but most of these are commercial at large scale but a disadvantage is the scale down is still not quite there so they require a large quantity of gas the smaller you try to scale these down the less economic they tend to be they have high capital costs and these technologies are will require a full scale chemical plant so this is like refinery sized equipment this is not something that you're going to put on every single one of those dots on that map with thousands of dots on it so to summarize quickly here i see i'm out of time um methane regulations are in place with the goal of reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by 40 to 45 percent methane mitigation strategies you can do leak detection and repair you can do pneumatics replacement you can try to conserve the methane combust the methane you can produce power you can produce liquid fuels and chemicals all of these have their different advantages and disadvantages and src is working with producers and technology companies to reduce emissions through our center for the demonstration of emissions reductions thanks norm okay great so as i said we have reached uh 11 o'clock we're hoping people can hang around for some of the questions because we've got about 10 of them and some of them are very good um i'm going to uh either zayna zaynab or i can can get our experts to answer some of these i'm just trying to find uh oh there it is sorry just making sure i can see the questions um eric do you want to address there's a couple things that uh jane uh raised one a few questions about fracking and how that fits into this i think we have had a few slides on fracking but also about cement casing and why is it cemented does it protect from contamination can you can you talk a bit about that sure i can i can speak about that for a minute i i've answered it in the q a section but but just to reiterate um the the cement is there you know to to solidify the bond between steel and rock you've got this space between the casing and the and the rock that is uh called the annulus and what what if you didn't cement it would there be potential for fluids uh transferring from one formation to another or there would be potentially fluids coming from the reservoir going into another formation or even right to surface if you didn't cement it in so um you know just to get into a bit of detail on how this cement is put in there it's pumped down the middle of the casing with a with a rubber plug behind it and then that rubber plug is pumped down and all of the the cement goes to the bottom of the well and up around the sides and cements it solidly in place uh for the protection of the environment but also to uh to increase the efficiency of the oil well great um so one of the other things then of course uh because we did have some slides about fracking and of course uh petra you're welcome to jump into this too i know there are people who have uh had concern in other parts of the world about hydraulic fracturing and the fact that the fractures may reach up into other zones or you know into drinking water what is fracking and maybe you can talk a little bit a little bit a little bit about what depths it's done in saskatchewan and why it's different here as opposed to maybe other places where they're fracturing higher up yeah yeah speaking speaking for saskatchewan specifically um the fracturing here is done uh mostly for the bakken reservoir and the bakken reservoir sits at about 17 or 1800 meters and and what they're trying to do there fracking is in essence trying to improve that porosity and permeability in the rock right at the outset so from initial production they want a little bit they want better better flow into the well so how you can fracture that rock and this is not a new technology it's been done since the 1960s i'm sure um is you pump water uh sometimes a thickened water water thickened with water gum or a polymer of some type into the reservoir at a very high pressure to the point where you reach the fracture point and what the fracture point is is where that fluid pressure increases the the amount of pressure that's holding the rock together and what happens is you induce a fracture and what you have to do and if you reduce the the water pressure after that that fracture would shut immediately so what you pump in along with that water is a little bit of sand called propent to prop open those fractures and keep them open and what that does is that allows you to access more of the reservoir now i know there are concerns and examples where where fracking has uh has gone very wrong um at the depths that we have it in saskatchewan here uh that is not a problem because the the fractures only go out maybe a few tens of meters from the well and they are especially trying to not have them go upwards at all because what that would do would that would access a different reservoir perhaps and one that would bring water into the into the oil well and essentially ruin it so it's in the it's in the company's interest to have these fracks be very controlled uh in the way they do it now i can't speak for for other places in the united states and that but but at least in saskatchewan fracking has been shown to be a very safe and effective way of increasing production great so uh we do have a question about methane and whether or not it can be used in enhanced oil recovery and i thought maybe erica or or petro could answer that was just a basic question can you use methane in the same way you can co2 in reservoirs let me throw that one to petra okay sure um so eric already answered uh a little bit in the q a chat but the answer is yes and it is currently being used it's not as good as co2 because it doesn't have as much stability in in oil and it cannot become miscible at most reservoir pressures but what it does it provides a to the reservoir so pressure support so you know that that cold bottle is still going to be under pressure and it's easier to recover oil out of that so the answer is yes okay good now there's one that i haven't typed an answer to it's from corey branbold and he's wondering if the energy released that is currently is currently isn't being used so he's talking about methane with flare stacks and venting could that be put towards some sort of energy input he said i know propane is a byproduct being bottled in my area what about using the flare to invented gas towards heating in some way i suppose an easy answer might be that there's not enough to make that economic if you have to try to put it in but maybe you could answer that erica do you know whether there's some movement towards that yeah that's kind of the short answer so yes it is methane and it can produce heat and it can produce power like i talked about so if if there's enough gas or there's existing infrastructure you can conserve that gas and sell it into the natural gas pipeline and then use it is if he's asking specifically about can you capture heat from the flare and use that heat that becomes an issue of location transporting heat between places is quite difficult so you would want to be using the heat on the site now some some sites do have heated separators so there might be a little bit of use for you know heating your oil after it comes out but it's much easier if you want to make use of that heat to just capture the gas and then burn the gas at the site that you need the heat okay good uh just by the way that there will be the recording of this webinar will be put up at our at the btrc you youtube page uh i think you'll receive an email about that as well um i'm just looking here for another question that i saw and now just second pardon me so uh one person asked whether um it's an actual geological question uh eric about uh because um i think he works in the field of um uh the exportation of um of uranium and other resources he's a geologist and he's wondering to what extent the oil reserves and the oil deposits in saskatchewan are considered world class or whether they're just kind of a a pale cousin to alberta as i suppose you could say yes i saw that question it's an interesting one and uh dan you may want to jump in on this as well as as dan has worked in probably some of the world class the true world class deposits um you know beyond uh weber and i would say wavern is an example of a world-class eor project uh and that's something that doesn't go on very commonly in the world and and i think you can you can look to weyburn as being world-class um beyond that though if we're if we're measuring this just by sheer volumes of oil produced uh no we're we're fairly far down in the world probably in a lot of things and and and below um below alberta as well uh dan do you have any comment uh well you can look at it from the perspective of how much oil does saskatchewan produce we produce somewhere around 488 000 barrels of oil a day it's about uh 10 to 12 of the total production from canada so uh it's it's not significant in that sense in terms of the size of the resource alberta obviously has the oil sands resource which is just absolutely huge we don't have that oil sands uh uh element here in in saskatchewan we do have the cold heavy oil production though in all and i don't want to get too long-winded in it we've got something like 55 60 billion barrels of oil in place cumulative with heavy and light oil that's not insignificant uh and the point that we've been making through all of this the most that we seem to be able to get out of that is around 10 so we're leaving 90 of it behind it's substantial it's significant and we think that the there you know the kinds of technologies that we've been talking about here today are most applicable here in saskatchewan so is it world-class maybe not but is it significant absolutely good thanks um there are some questions we're simply not going to get to there's a really interesting question from someone in india i think i'm going to leave that for petrol to respond via email on that and as well um there's a question just a general one about whether nanotechnology is being used in the or and i can safely say that yes it is but i don't know that we have time to get to that one today i would like to ask um gary prochan's uh question unless that was just answered did you just type an answer to that error looks like somebody did um he's talking about wells there he is in wayburn he says i'm not sure i fully understand this but it's a good question by the way we'll stop at 11 15 so we have another four minutes that we'll go through some of these questions in wayburn stainless steel tubing is used what is the life and technical risks plus economic concerns of this he said i know in the philippines for geothermal energy this is an issue so i'm assuming maybe he's talking about corrosion i'm not sure also offsetting oil wells is there any protection for offsetting wells not in the co2 and are they protected so i believe wavering did do some research into wells didn't it yeah there's there's been extensive research into uh um wellbore integrity i guess is the the broad uh field of study um and looking at what happens to uh you saw that weyburn was drilled in the 1950s and there's a lot of really old completions there and there was a lot of concern around what will co2 do to that casing and and you know there there's it took a long time just to even catalog all of the different wells and the different types of completions that they have uh in essence if the cement job is done well and done right uh the the the wells are not exposed to the co2 for old old wells for new wells yes stainless steel or coatings uh reused on a lot of the equipment there um and a lot of the the surface pipeline and all the surface equipment has a has special coating on it and as for economics yes that does indeed indeed change the economics i would say um the the preparation that would be required for taking a a field from the 1950s and bringing it up to date to to perform uh co2 er on would be significant and would uh need to have protected tubulars like that i don't know if petro or dan you have anything to add to that coverage well eric so one other interesting question that we got um if the carbon tax was up to 50 a ton uh one of our our viewers said well you know if a barrel of oil produces let's say half a ton of co2 when it's burned at what point uh if if an oil company is being penalized for producing that barrel of oil does it become uneconomic to continue to produce oil if they're paying a fifty dollar ton per uh fifty dollars per ton and and uh a barrel of oil is producing half a ton i would think part of the mix in that would be if you're storing co2 by producing that oil then you're reducing the amount as well of co2 that's part of that footprint but i'm not quite sure i understand the question but i think the basic idea would be that you know if the carbon tax goes high enough does the production of oral simply become unfeasible if all companies are having to pay that tax okay there's many parts to the answer to that question what drives the economics of the industry obviously is the demand for the resource and the commodity price so uh that is the first thing that a lot of companies look at the other thing is the operating costs in general what does it cost to produce that barrel of oil uh and the cost of of carbon becomes a key part of that what is the right answer there that's something that uh that companies are looking at and looking at what they need to do to to manage their business effectively the cost of doing business going forward is going to be involve having to deal with uh with cm2 cost of carbon uh there are a lot of companies uh in saskatchewan who are involved in what uh what is called sagd you heard that term uh uh it requires you to generate steam you'd have to burn natural gas to generate steam a lot of companies are looking at how can we cover this recover the co2 from burning natural gas to generate steam and then what do we do with that co2 can we put it somewhere can we store it uh so that that becomes part of an economic analysis uh then the extending the life of these older oil and gas reservoirs if co2 were to deliver be delivered uh to their doorstep at a price that would be attractive to their continuing business would companies be interested in doing that these are some of the bigger questions that are being asked right now let me add this you know because this is really important you've heard a lot about the federal government investing in blue hydrogen these days in in alberta well the reason it's blue is because the hydrogen is generated from organic or hydrocarbon systems there's a lot of co2 that is being produced the alberta carbon trunk line system was built to to transport that produced co2 into of all places uh eor projects we see that as an opportunity and and ptrc the province of saskatchewan has been way ahead of the curve on that we have weyburn co2 eor project we have the uh aqua store project we have opportunities we believe to to use co2 in other enhanced soil recovery projects connect with the alberta carbon trunk line system so we've been ahead of that the provinces src the universities uh and so that's what we're looking to to provide the uh understanding of the technology of how this thing will work in order for companies to make these kinds of business decisions good great dan thanks so i think i will wrap this up and i'll let dan have a few closing comments i just wanted to say that you will when you log out you'll be taken to a page that is just simply a three question survey if we did not answer your question in quite the way you'd hoped or if we didn't get to it because there were a total of 15 questions i don't think we got to them all we tried to type responses um you can re-type your question there's a field the third question lets you put your question back in and those are sent to me so i will endeavor to try to get you a written response to those questions please do the survey it's it's really quick it's like click here click there type something if you want um and aside from that we will be posting uh the complete webinar at the ptrc youtube page please do visit both our youtube page and src's they have some great videos there that explain a lot of the science about what they're doing in all of their research areas they're doing agriculture they're going well beyond oil and gas at src and what they do and what they cover um and aside from that thank you very much for attending uh dan did you want to have a few closing comments yeah thank you uh so the ptrc just happens to be sponsoring this webinar uh what i want to leave you with is that we are part of a network of research organizations here in saskatchewan who are committed to the sustainability of this resource industry uh and reducing emissions that that work includes the src thank you for for being part of this uh the ccs knowledge center if we're focused on carbon capture and then the research organizations at the u of r and the u of s we all actually collaborate quite effectively uh together but we also collaborate with other jurisdictions in particular alberta there is no homegrown solution here this is uh an industry that requires solutions from all different parts and ptrc the src the knowledge center we're all part of that network uh and uh so i want you to to understand that that we may be a small province but we're hitting above our weight here when it comes to to being involved in this research to to make our industry sustainable and reduce uh the emissions associated with it uh thank you petro thank you erica uh eric and norm for your presentations and yeah if you have more questions please feel free to reach out to any of us i would be happy to answer them thanks dan and also i'll say thanks to matt and to zainab for monitoring our questions and answers for us and suzanne for helping to contribute towards setting up my survey and some of the other aspects of this particular meeting thank you everyone have a great heading into the holidays have a great holiday and we will endeavor to respond to any of your questions if you feel they weren't responded to in full thank you very much and have a good have a good weekend everybody

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Views: 20,616

Keywords: gas, oil, oil and gas, webinar, petroleum

Id: AdNw-8Hpt7U

Length: 80min 11sec (4811 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021