Colossal Chore

Even government computers are strained by oilfield waste

This article appears in the May 2009 issue of Alberta Oil Magazine

by Peter McKenzie-Brown

The story of petroleum is a story of waste.

Consider the volumes involved: At perhaps 3.5 million barrels per day, Canada is the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, and at 16.9 billion cubic feet per day, the third-largest natural gas producer. Add in the gas liquids and related products and the sheer volume of fossil fuels that flow out of the Canadian soil starts to become astronomical.

And these numbers measure “spec” oil and gas – products that are clean enough for pipeline transport. Consumers rarely consider the huge amounts of waste created as the industry brings its output up to spec.

At every stage, considerable volumes of waste need to be treated. Consider the sources of upstream oilfield waste. Seismic surveys, wellsite construction and drilling produce wastes ranging from bush cuttings to rock chips to drilling and fraccing fluids. Production wastes include salty byproduct water, gunk in tailings ponds, contaminants like carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, and soil contaminated with sulfur. Once a plant needs to be decommissioned or a well shut in and abandoned, the producer creates more wastes that need to be carefully managed.

How much waste is involved? In Alberta, the Energy Resources Conservation Board regulates oilfield wastes. After a lengthy explanation of the limitations of the board’s computer system, Susan Halla, a regulatory manager, says, “We’ll be able to give you exact information in 2011.” In the meantime, she won’t even guess.

Even when detailed data are available, it will be incomplete. The reason is that most wastes from oil sands mining operations are not considered oilfield wastes. They are classified as “industrial wastes” and regulated by Alberta Environment rather than the ERCB.

Petroleum waste only begins in the “upstream,” exploration and production side of the industry. Once spec products flow through the pipeline into the “downstream,” refining and distribution processes produce wastes of their own. Like waste from oil sands mining, they are classified as “industrial wastes” and regulated by Alberta Environment.

By far, however, the largest volumes of physical waste occur in the distant downstream end of the petroleum products life cycle. Many items – plastics and chemicals, say – end up in landfills and dumps, unregulated incinerators, beaches and worse. Equally important, consumers burn natural gas and refined products to generate energy, thereby yielding carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and a variety of other unsavory incidentals. As emissions, however, they are technically not considered “wastes.”

The seriousness of upstream waste management did not become clear until the 1980s. An ERCB chairman of the era, the late Vern Millard, once explained, “We used to think Earth could absorb any amount of human waste without a problem. It has now become clear that it can’t.”

In an effort to obviate official regulation, the old Canadian Petroleum Association – the forerunner to today’s Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers – created an industry-wide voluntary code of waste management practices. Although regarded as a good stop-gap measure, the CPA guidelines didn’t last. Governments soon took over the job of regulation.

The ERCB’s role in waste regulation began in the mid-1980s, when the industry began to recognize that oil could be recovered from oily leftover materials in tank bottoms, separator sludge, flare pits and so on. Facilities known as reclaimers began to emerge in active oil- and gas-producing areas. At first, the board’s regulation of these facilities was aimed at making sure volumes of recovered oil were accounted for properly. Spurred by the federal government’s 1986 proclamation of dangerous goods transportation regulations, though, the board became heavily involved in oilfield waste management, regulation and inspection.

In 1990, Alberta began consolidating existing environmental acts and regulations into a comprehensive document that eventually became known as the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act. This and other environmental measures slice and dice provincial wastes in a number of ways. They can be classified as oilfield wastes or industrial wastes, and those wastes can be hazardous, dangerous or not-dangerous. Alberta Environment regulates hazardous and industrial wastes. The ERCB regulates oilfield wastes.

As waste regulation evolved, it became apparent that reclamation or recycling services could no longer be permitted to operate without regulation. After all, they were reclaiming wastes that were potentially dangerous, and sometimes hazardous. Hazardous oilfield wastes include hydrocarbons with low flashpoints; highly acidic or alkaline chemicals; and such volatile organic compounds as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes, which collectively go by the acronym BTEX.

After these products had been defined as hazardous, the board gave the owners of the province’s reclaimer operations a simple choice. Transform their facilities into high-standard waste management facilities or, in the words of CCS Corporation’s Greg Dickie, “clean them up and shut them down.” Most chose to convert to quality waste management operations.

With oilfield waste facilities not allowed to handle hazardous materials, the province badly needed a large disposal facility. Accordingly, Alberta developed a “special waste treatment center” northwest of Edmonton at Swan Hills to deal with hazardous oilfield wastes and also carcinogenic PCBs, which are primarily a waste product from electric transformers. Owned by the province but operated by the private sector, Swan Hills is primarily a specialized, high-temperature waste incinerator. The oilfield wastes that require incineration there include spent filters, oily rags and specialized high-BTU wastes.

As the 1990s wore on, regulators developed rules covering everything from the construction of landfills to deep well injection of liquid wastes. Those rules and the constant changes to them are available in a glut of guidebooks, information letters, directives and interim directives – all of which have been posted online by the agencies responsible.

Practice Run

H2S re-injection a rehearsal for carbon storage program

This article appears in the May 2009 issue of Alberta Oil Magazine

by Peter McKenzie-Brown

Once an obscure part of waste management, the injection underground of unwanted gases will soon become a huge part of Western Canada’s business. The industry has had plenty of practice at disposing of nastier materials than carbon dioxide.

Oil and gas operations produce two kinds of acid gases – hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The former is usually stripped from the gas stream and converted into sulfur. Tom Byrnes, a reservoir engineering manager at the Energy Resources Conservation Board, says the sulfurous impurity is sometimes just stripped from the gas and re-injected underground. “It’s usually an economic question. There may be small volumes of H2S in the gas stream, or the infrastructure [to strip out sulfur] may not be in place to make it practical.” In Alberta, the board regulates all disposals through disposal wells and first approved an H2S re-injection project in 1989.

Both of these acid gases are routinely stripped from natural gas for re-injection, as appropriate. “But the smaller the concentration of H2S or CO2 there is in the gas stream, the more expensive it is to get it out. It’s a problem of diminishing returns,” Byrnes says.

If H2S can have commercial value as a source of sulfur, CO2 is frequently injected into operating oilfields to stimulate production. This is not new. Carbon dioxide has long been used for enhanced oil recovery, to urge additional barrels out of elderly oilfields. One such project has been operating in the 50-year-old Weyburn oilfield in southern Saskatchewan for nine years.

The project uses a 330-kilometer pipeline to transport carbon dioxide captured at the Great Plains Coal Gasification plant, which manufactures methane from coal near Beulah, North Dakota. As it keeps oil flowing from this aging field, each year the EnCana-operated project disposes of about 1.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. This is environmentally beneficial, since CO2 is both an acid gas that can acidify water and a greenhouse gas that can trap heat within Earth’s ionosphere.

While EnCana’s Weyburn project is profitable in its own right, most industrial operators would find it economically prohibitive to strip CO2 from industrial processes for sequestration down disposal wells. Those economics changed profoundly last July when Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach announced a $2-billion commitment of government assistance to advance carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies in the province. Provincial authorities are now sifting through a dozen applications for funding, and will announce the successful projects as decisions are made.

Alberta’s involvement follows a gestation period of deep study, including a provincial policy paper which observed that “Alberta has a unique opportunity to implement carbon capture and storage to substantially reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. CO2 emissions can be captured where they are produced, transported and stored in geological formations (such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs, coal beds and deep saline aquifers) that may be located hundreds of kilometers away.

Ultimately, CO2 capture and storage technologies provide the province with the greatest potential to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions while, at the same time, retaining our ability to produce and provide energy to the rest of the world.”

According to that policy paper, Alberta is counting on CCS to meet 70 per cent of its long-term greenhouse reduction targets. If the five provincially subsidized projects – likely to cost a billion dollars each–all go into operation, they would collectively reduce emissions by up to five million tonnes annually. That is likely just the beginning for large-scale underground carbon sequestration projects in the province.

While five million tonnes annually of sequestered CO2 may seem like a large number, it’s barely a whiff of what’s possible. Over four decades, Alberta’s greenhouse gas emissions plan targets a 200-million tonne cut in emissions, but only compared to a do-nothing scenario. That volume is a bare indication of the huge volumes of waste – solids, liquids, effluents and emissions – generated by one of the world’s leading petroleum producers.