It started with an article in the Toronto Star. It was not only confusing but the choice of words tended to cloak the problems. Plus the locations are confusing. Judging by how the story is structured, it is obviously put together by a trained reporter. The reporter’s sources were also disclosed as Environment Canada and the Ministry of Energy in Alberta. It seems that the Alberta Energy people must have learned an entirely different science than those of us in the rest of Canada.
It is the source documents from the Alberta Ministry of Energy that seem to have caused the confusion. The Toronto Star story is about a tar-sands company Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL) that has had a bitumen seepage problem around one of its deep bitumen extraction wells in the Cold Lake tar sands area in north eastern Alberta.
This seepage started two years ago and Alberta Energy and the company are still trying to figure out why. It is reported that CNRL has let something like 1.2 million litres of bitumen go into the local environment with resulting deaths among the local wildlife.
The confusion as to the area of the spill is because there are at least four major fissures where extensive blowout seepage is evident. These sites are as much as 15 kilometres apart, centred on Burnt Lake that is 20 to 25 kilometres west of the Primrose Lake air firing range of the Canadian Air Force.
What is believed to have happened is that the Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) technology used by CNRL has forced open old drill holes in the area and that the company did not have the equipment in place to capture the bitumen at those locations.
What has environmentalists concerned is that SAGD mining injects high pressure steam in a ‘down’ well to force bitumen to the surface through an ‘up’ well. They are worried that the pressure of the steam has fractured the underlying rock formations in the area and nobody knows where the bitumen will next emerge.
An Alberta Energy document that explains the process to the public, tells us that 80 per cent (135 billion barrels) of the tar sands bitumen are buried too deep below the surface for open pit mining and can only be accessed by methods such as SAGD.
The only serious problem with the document is that Energy Alberta refers to the emerging material as oil. It is bitumen and bitumen can only become synthetic crude oil by going through a highly polluting refining process.
The document also refers to the bitumen and condensed steam as an emulsion. While you might be able to create something similar to an emulsion under laboratory conditions, it is important to remember that condensed steam has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. It is called water. Bitumen and water do not mix.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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