Sticky Wicket, Sticky Bitumen

Sticky wicket: A sticky wicket is a metaphor used to describe a difficult circumstance. It originated as a term for difficult circumstances in the sport of cricket, caused by a damp and soft pitch. (Wikipedia)
Sticky bitumen ... “one of the problems in the oil sands is, once you start sticking bitumen onto things, you never get it off again." -- Murray Gray

Back in 2009, I highlighted Dr. Murray Gray, an oil sands expert (https://desulf.blogspot.com/2009/05/murray-gray-specializing-in-canada-oil.html). Today, allow me to update you on his work since then.

TIP: Google® murray gray bitumen and browse a few of the resulting pages. One of the nuggets you will find is a very long list of his scholarly publications (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_sWnVwsAAAAJ&hl=en)

Dr. Gray’s LinkedIn page (https://ca.linkedin.com/in/murray-gray-2584757) includes a list of the positions he has held over the course of almost 40 years, including a stint in Qatar.

The most interesting item, however, is a 58-page transcript of an interview conducted as part of the Oil Sands Oral History Project.

While the focus is on the technical aspects of oil sands research, it is a wide ranging interview, touching on economics, politics, and institutional development.

IF you are interested in oil sands
IF you are interested in developing research partnerships between academia and industry
IF you are interested in the specific and detailed research problems involving bitumen
IF you are interested in the path from laboratory generated ideas to commercialization of those ideas

THEN you should read this interview. It will be well worth your time, because it is, in effect, a fascinating, insightful case study that addresses all these issues … and more.

You can access the entire interview at: https://glenbow.ucalgary.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Gray_Murray.pdf

Excerpts from the interview appear below.

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EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. MURRAY GRAY
https://glenbow.ucalgary.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Gray_Murray.pdf

I got involved at looking at potential petrochemical investments, because at that time everything was very bubbly and frothy in the energy industry … there were a lot of new natural gas discoveries coming on and no market. So the companies on the natural gas side of the industry were very interested in petrochemicals and other possibilities to try to bring their exploration results to market.

There was every possible energy source you can imagine being actively pursued because the world had realized that petroleum -- at that time people weren’t talking about petroleum running out, but the political issues with petroleum supply were first and foremost in everyone’s mind, so the challenge of secure supply was what was driving all of this effort.

The whole area of biomass hasn’t actually progressed very much since I was there. What’s really advanced is newer and better ways of using biomass as a straight fuel.

I like to draw a distinction in picking a general area and picking some of the highlights that are really close to a breakthrough where research would really make a difference, and I don’t think my capability is quite as good on that.

in my experience in the oil sands industry, the most important technology transfers -- the most significant transfers have been the people that are trained who have the background, who have the analytical skills. They then go out into the industry and start to have a significant impact. If I look at some of the most important developments that have hit the oil sands industry, a lot of it was very bright people who had been educated at the universities and then went to finishing school in industry, picked up the skills in terms of project management and how to do things on a larger scale and then things started to happen. So when you’re looking at these huge industries, the university is great for developing ideas, but then there’s a whole sequence of events that has to happen before it can be reduced to practice and become an important part of an industry. And often the idea, valuable as it is, it may be many years before it comes to fruition as a fully-developed process concept. If I look at most of the technologies, it really transformed the oil sands industry over the last two decades. In many cases, there were interesting lab observations or ideas that then took an awful lot of hard work to go through piloting and scale up. So technology transfer in the oil sands industry to me takes on a very [different] connotation than if you talk to people in information technologies where if you come up with a brilliant idea for a cell phone app, you can go and commercialize it almost right away. The cycle and the amount of effort and investment and time required for energy production of any kind is much, much longer and much more arduous.

When we talked about upgrading, Syncrude was really the only game in town. The other companies that were interested in oil sands were much more focused on primary production -- companies like Imperial Oil, at the time was very much into in situ production. That was their major focus. Syncrude was the company that was interested in extraction, working with Jacob Masliyah, and interested in upgrading working with me and a few others. And so through AOSTRA I got to know the different companies, what their interests were and some of the leading researchers at those companies. In particular, I focused on Syncrude because they had a research centre here in Edmonton, and still do. It’s a very active research centre, and here was a group that was speaking the language of research in oil sands here in Edmonton and that was a wonderful opportunity.
[NOTE:
syncrude.ca
Syncrude Canada Ltd. is one of the world's largest producers of synthetic crude oil from oil sands and the largest single source producer in Canada. Wikipedia
Headquarters: Fort McMurray, Canada
Number of employees: 4,800 (2016)
Founded: December 1964
Owners: Suncor Energy, Imperial Oil, CNOOC Petroleum North America ULC, Sinopec
Type of business: Joint venture]

Initially the main contact with Syncrude was through Joe Liu, and he had an interesting role at Syncrude Research, which has persisted. They’ve always had somebody who was primarily interested in external partnerships and liaisons. So Joe Liu’s role was to link in with the AOSTRA program, to link in with the university labs and the government labs that were doing relevant research, and to try and generate productive relationships as much as possible, and to get the best value out of those partnerships for Syncrude, which is a fair proposition. The other people were Emerson Sanford, who was a group leader working on upgrading research at that time, and so through AOSTRA and the meetings that were held every year in Banff at that time I got to know some of those people and to start talking more about research relationships. Eventually, AOSTRA wound down most of its activities. The university program was handed off briefly and then it disappeared; and, around the same time that AOSTRA disappeared, Syncrude decided that they wanted to put more investment into collaborative research, so they explicitly redirected their effort away from doing as much as possible in-house into a more distributive model. And so the first people they came and started talking to were some of the researchers who’d been very active with AOSTRA. Jacob Masliyah had been active working directly with Syncrude on developing some of their process models for the extraction process. I’d been working with AOSTRA and a couple of other people had been working with people like Norbert Morgenstern -- had been doing a lot of work in the oil sands industry on a consulting and research basis. So there was a nucleus of people who had the background and the appreciation of the industry based on AOSTRA’s investment. Syncrude could come in and start working directly. So the interesting thing at that time is the province had basically bowed out of active research in this area, basically wound down to little or no effort, and it was the combination of Syncrude plus the Government of Canada through partnership programs of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council that really launched the much-stronger university/industry partnerships that moved forward at the University of Alberta. The AOSTRA partnerships were pretty loose. There was a university program with an industry steering committee. The industry people would dutifully attend the annual conferences and it was a good way to meet and make contacts, but it wasn’t really a partnership. There were partnership activities going on the side but what really launched the flourishing ecosystem that we see now at the University of Alberta was Syncrude basically saying, “We want to have longer term partnerships; we want to step away from short-term contracts and move into longer-term research that’ll really develop trained graduate students and a focused effort over a sustained period of time.” And they were able to leverage their investment with the Government of Canada.

The other thing that’s been essential is sustained commitment and strategic long-term investment, and so AOSTRA was very strategic but then AOSTRA disappeared and, ironically, during one of the key periods in how this whole effort has developed at the University of Alberta, the Government of Alberta bowed out of the picture and it was largely a federal partnership with industry directly that allowed us at the University of Alberta to build up dramatically in terms of our capacity. Moving from short-term consulting-type contracts to five-year commitments for sustained research was a huge breakthrough for us, and we were able to deliver much more value, I think, to the company partners than we were on a short-term collaborative basis.

At the time Otto Strausz was very actively working on understanding the chemistry of the oil sands, but Otto is not a chemical engineer and so the gap that I immediately observed is Otto was -- Otto Strausz and his team were generating huge amounts of chemical information but they were struggling to relate it to how the industry actually operated. And so the work that I was doing was trying to come up with tools and relationships; how could we take a chemical reactor running at Syncrude, for example, and use some of the insight on the chemistry to do a better job? How could we raise our understanding of this very complicated bitumen material to do a better job of processing the bitumen into value-added fuels? And so that was the -- that’s basically the area where I’ve been working ever since, broadly defined. What are the -- what’s the composition? What are the properties of this material? How does that dictate how large-scale industrial equipment operates? What can we do in the lab to better understand how to push that technology forward?

What I value the most from my time is coming up with a much better understanding of the composition of bitumen from an engineering perspective, not a detailed physical chemical series of measurements, but how do we understand this material at the level of detail that we can then use it to analyse a large-scale process? And most of what I’ve been working on is what we call upgrading, which is taking the bitumen after the hot-water process, after it’s been cleaned up, and then try to do something useful with it because nobody really wants the bitumen. Well, I shouldn’t say that, we’re selling more and more diluted bitumen but it’s really not a desirable end-product. It needs dramatic processing in order to make valuable transportation fuels. And so what I think I’ve done -- the biggest contribution is on trying to understand how, what we know about chemistry applies or does not apply well to this complicated mixture. What happens when you start processing this kind of feed stock at temperatures over 400 degrees centigrade at high pressure? What are the catalysts really doing and what are the components within the bitumen that really control that whole process? Ironically, I think it’s really only been in the last two or three years that I’m satisfied personally that I’ve answered those questions thoroughly, and that we’ve really set the scientific basis for process technologies for this material. Empirically, people were building and operating these things for many, many years but now we finally nailed the details of the chemical science to the point where we can really integrate what’s the basic chemistry with how do these reactors operate. In the past, when I first got involved in oil sands, there was no agreement on what the important components where, what the real reaction pathways were; if you put a catalyst in, what was it really doing? And so half the time you were operating in the dark. You were making guesses. Sometimes people were making inspired guesses; sometimes they were totally and utterly wrong about what was happening, but they had -- they had empirical information and they were doing their best to link what they were putting [in] with what they were getting out. What I think I’ve been able to contribute the most is making the link between those two. If this is what you’ve got, this is what you can hope for; this is about the best you can do; and what are the pathways in between -- how can you try and make it better?

Well, one example is we realized that bitumen is a liquid material and the history of chemical-reaction engineering, my core discipline, is they don’t really like liquids very much. Liquids are awkward. A lot of the work was done on ice gas streams. Gas is much better behaved, so it’s low density; the reaction pathways are much, much simpler in the gas phase, and so a lot of people’s understanding was all based on the fundamentals of gas-phase chemical reactors. Syncrude, Suncor, they don’t operate gas-phase conversion units for bitumen; you cannot put that material into the gas phase, it’s always liquid. And so understanding how materials like coke develop; how the different components react and change, I think that’s where I’ve made the most contribution. That’s been the most exciting thing for me. So for Syncrude, we did some very significant work on understanding how the large molecules broke apart and what those fragments were doing in the liquid phase versus if we could get them into the vapour phase. And so we came up with some innovative lab-scale reactors that said how can we get those cracked fragments into the vapour phase as fast as possible? What does that do to the yield and what does it do to the quality of the products? What we found is, if you can get the molecules to crack and into the vapour phase as fast as possible, you get much less coke by-product; you get more liquid product and you get better quality. So that got Syncrude and other companies thinking along a whole different direction. What could they do with process technologies in order to do better? So Syncrude is still working on process improvements. How can they put the liquid feed into their reactor to get those crap products out as fast as possible? Other companies, there’s a small company called Envision Technologies that was developed by a couple of former Syncrude employees, they took some of our ideas with some completely novel ideas of their own and have developed a new reactor technology to try and get more product out of this raw material using some of these ideas based on these lab experiments. So sometimes if you get a good scientific or applied engineering observation, other people will come up with interesting ways of using it that the discoverer would never have foreseen, and that’s certainly been my experience in this case.
[NOTE:
Press Release
Date: January 25, 2006
Envision Technologies Corp. creates dedicated entity focused on the ETX Upgrader design

CALGARY, AB – Gerard Monaghan, CEO of ETX Systems is pleased to announce the creation of ETX Systems Inc. The company, a private entity incorporated under the laws of Alberta has the sole mandate to demonstrate and commercialize the ETX Upgrader. Development of the ETX Reactor was carried out under Envision Technologies Corp. In support of the mandate of the new company all tangible and intangible assets associated with the ETX Reactor technology will be transferred to ETX Systems.

"Under Envision Technologies Corp. we pursued a number of business opportunities of which the ETX Reactor was one.", Mr. Monaghan explains. "We were using the company not only to evaluate technologies but also as a vehicle through which to perform consulting activities. To properly execute our business plan we required a legal entity that is focused only on the single ETX Reactor asset."

A private offering is planned to capitalize ETX Systems Inc. The funds will be used to carry out a number of projects critical to achieving the commercialization of the technology. The funds will also be used to set up basic supporting infrastructure.

ETX Systems Inc. is a fit-for-purpose private entity based in Calgary, AB, whose sole mandate is to commercialize its patented IYQ Upgrading technology. The process claims to deliver revolutionary yields and qualities relative to delayed coking, for significantly less cost per barrel. The increased production of high quality liquids leads to reduced environmental impact, leveraged through both the upstream and downstream scope.  For more information contact Gerard Monaghan, CEO of ETX Systems Inc. (gerard.monaghan@etxsystems.com ).
TIP: Google envision technologies reactor
source: http://etxsystems.com/pr/etx_pr060125.shtml ]

Envision Technologies went out and built a pilot plant out at Devon at the Canmet facilities there in order to test their ideas of how they could combine an innovative reactor concept with some of the results of the work that we had done here at the University of Alberta. My involvement at that point was more as an advisor to give them feedback on their process design to try and point out issues they should be worried about based on our experience in the lab, and so there was a good collaboration in that, but it was, I wasn’t driving that process. But it was fascinating to see the series of steps and some of the struggles they had to go through scale-up to get up to a scale of about one-barrel-a-day of feed stock. Things that we don’t even think about in a lab become crucial when you go to a larger scale of operation, and it impressed on me, as I mentioned to you earlier, the long and arduous path from an interesting idea in the lab to a technology that is ready for application in industry. There’s an awful lot of effort and time, and money, that have to go into that transition.

In the upgrading world the main by-product of concern is what we call coke. This is a solid by-product from bitumen when you heat it up and crack the molecules just by applying heat. The objective, in terms of making a more valuable processor, [is] to minimize the yield of coke as much as you can. And so what I described to you earlier about understanding what happened in the liquid phase versus vapour phase, understanding how these molecules actually behave is crucial to understanding how can you manipulate the bitumen to get as little coke as possible? Now, before I ever learned about any of this, some of the major approaches had been developed empirically and some of that work went back to the 1930s, which was when a lot of the early refining technology development was done. In the United States and Germany they came up with the two major approaches. You either take these large molecules and heat them up, or you take these large molecules, don’t heat them up quite as much, but add hydrogen in a catalyst -- hydrogen gas. Those were the two main pathways and today those are the two main pathways. That continues to be the bulk of what the industry is doing; or that’s actually all that the industry is doing and they haven’t broken out of that mold. And so the challenge has always been --how far can you, given the molecular structure, how far can you push either of those technologies to get either as little coke as possible or as much liquid product in the hydrogenation pathway with as little cost as possible? So it’s, in a sense you could argue it’s all just been optimization of an idea that was already there from 80 years ago. But that’s, that’s often the way these studies go.

The interesting thing with the collaboration with Imperial Oil, was -- that whole effort grew out of some conversations between the then President of Imperial Oil in Canada, the President of the University of Alberta Rod Fraser, and David Lynch, Dean of Engineering, and at that time Exxon Mobil, the parent company, was investing in some major initiatives at Stanford University in a collaborative mode with other companies, and they said, “Well, you can go and talk to them,” and the University of Alberta was pushing back and saying “No, no, no, you should come and work with us on oil sands because we are the place where things are happening. We shouldn’t be a little flea on the program at Stanford, that doesn’t make any sense, and that doesn’t do justice to the potential of the oil sands.” And so through discussions, the idea for the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation came about where there would be an endowment established, funded by Imperial Oil, and the university would then go and get operating funds, as well as using the income from the endowment to have long-term, sustained effort on oil sands research. The most important part of that from my perspective is not just the model of how it happened, but the explicit recognition by Imperial Oil at that point that they were not happy with the available technology. So they were very upfront. They did not see that they could still use the same technology 20, 30, 40, 50 years out.

The resource was there; the oil was there; they had the leases; they had the mine plans, but they -- their position was they couldn’t continue to use the technology as they had at that time. They needed new approaches and so they, they wanted COSI [Canadian Oil Sands Innovation] to be a sort of “skunk” works to try, even if they were off-the-wall, if they made sense potentially, if you could get the idea to work, if it made sense in terms of a new opportunity for the industry, they were willing to try almost anything as long as there was a path of how that idea could possibly be translated into practice.

They saw some big differences. Well, two things -- they saw some big differences between oil sands and in the mining side and their work on in situ. So part of the scope of COSI was to focus it only on mining extraction and upgrading of the minable oil sands. They thought, and they still think, they knew what were the opportunities; what were the potentials of all the in situ technologies. They were continuing to develop them and are focused on developing their own technology today. So they didn’t feel they needed university help in that. Where they needed help was this problem of how do you come up with completely new technologies; how do you try ideas; and so they saw having a university partnership as a way of dramatically amplifying what they could do themselves. Doesn’t mean they gave up on that question themselves; they’ve continued to look at alternative technologies, completely different ways of doing things. But they see the university collaboration as an important adjunct to that. And part of it is also that COSIA is not just University of Alberta; it’s led by the University of Alberta but we engage other universities as well where there’s capability, and where there’s particular ideas available that we can try and build on.

As an example, let me give you an idea of what the status of COSI is today. We’re working on three major programs, three major themes. The one that’s been longest standing that we identified right away was what you might call “water-free” extraction. How can we get the bitumen out without using warm water, without generating tailings ponds to get around rather than trying to fix the tailings problem: how can we get out of it all together; which is a good engineering approach -- don’t just look at the end of the pipe; go back to the beginning and say “Well, what could you do differently?” So we’ve been working on a variety of projects to understand how solvents and bitumen and oil sands components interact; how can we get the bitumen out and recover solvents in a process that has potential to be most efficient and environmentally responsible. And that’s looking extremely promising and that’s our -- one of our biggest and most important areas, and where Imperial Oil has been working along in parallel working towards being ready for a pilot type of demonstration plant to actually take it to a commercial scale. So that one is looking promising, although they’ve been a little coy at saying -- until they make the decision they won’t say when they will make the decision to go ahead with a major investment. But we’re getting close to the point where the next stage would be a 50-million-dollar pilot.

Second theme that we developed right from the start was upgrading. What can we do to the bitumen that would bypass the known limitations of the two main pathways that are available? Heat it up or heat it up with hydrogen. We know what those do. Those two pathways COSI doesn’t touch. We look instead at what are alternate ways of trying to get more effective and -- both environmentally-effective and cost-effective upgrading technologies. The final area that we’ve been developing most recently in contradiction to what I just said is tailings. Because of the importance of the tailings to the mining industry, we’re now doing some work on tailings working in partnership with multiple companies; so non-aqueous extraction and upgrading are both in partnership with Imperial Oil. The work that we’re doing now on aqueous tailings is with the whole industry. We’re partnering with COSIA, which is why we probably have to change the name of COSI -- it’s the Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance -- all of the industry partners have got together and said they’re going to share all their technology on oil sands tailings and so we’re working with that group of companies to try and see if we can come up with a better way of dealing with tailings. That’s a big challenge but it’s such an important topic to the industry that we’re trying to help out. My personal opinion, it’s probably the longest shot of the three in terms of making a commitment, or I should say making a significant contribution. So in the non-aqueous case I think we’re making great progress and I think the indications are that Imperial Oil should commit to a pilot because it looks very promising. In the area of upgrading, we haven’t been quite as successful. We’ve been trying a whole series of areas, some of which have been dead ends, like the -- well, COSI didn’t sponsor the biotechnology work, but that kind of an idea where you say “Let’s take a graduate student, try something out, see if it works; if it doesn’t work, then, we’ll go on to something else.” So we’ve had a fair bit of that, looking at possible upgrading pathways. The most promising area right now is some radically-novel catalysts that are being developed in the chemistry department here at the University of Alberta that are -- that have the potential to completely change how an upgrader operates in terms of the temperatures and pressures required to make use of hydrogen. So it is at hydrogen, that pathway, but it would be at low-pressure, low temperature if these catalysts prove up the way their initial indications are showing. This would be a radically-different way of trying to process bitumen. In terms of other industry partners, we’ve got a partner working in Germany coming up -- that’s the project that’s just wrapping up; they’ve been making molecules that represent some of the big molecules that we think are in bitumen and understanding better how they behave. We’ve had some very good work with Christian Detellier at the University of Ottawa who’s a leading expert on clay materials because the clays are so important in oil sands, and so he’s been doing a lot of work on how clays and bitumen interact, and what can we do to change that interaction to do better recovery processing? We’ve been working with University of British Columbia doing some very fundamental work on understanding what happens at mineral interfaces. We know we have sand and clay interfaces; what do the bitumen molecules really do on those interfaces? And so the lab of Keng Chou at University of British Columbia has the ability to actually look at those surfaces in ways that I’d never conceived of before we got him to start thinking about this problem. So these are examples of some of the expertise that we brought in on these projects.

A lot of what we’ve been trying to do through COSI -- my most recent effort has been to try and set up teams and keep them talking to each other, and this is one of the biggest problems that we have at the university. It’s easy to often get a graduate, get a professor, starting on an area. They’ll get graduate students involved, but they don’t necessarily keep in touch with their colleagues down the hall working on related projects. So one of the challenges with a centre like COSI is to have regular points of contact so that we push the researchers to talk to each other, we make sure that they’re aware of what the lab down the hall is doing, so they’re trying to work cooperatively as much as possible, and that we try and avoid having them develop into silos where they’re working on an area and not communicating back and forth. And that continues to be a problem, although we have a huge amount of oil sands research. To some extent, the individual professors reach out and make linkages outside of their own particular group, but to some extent the industry partners serve that function because they don’t tolerate silos very well. And so a company like Syncrude, they’re involved in multiple projects; they serve a crucial role of helping to make sure that there isn’t duplication and that the work is complementary; and in some ways they’re better positioned to do that than the academic researchers; there’s limitations on what we can do in terms of sharing information back and forth within the university; time limitations as well as the way academia works. So if I look at the collaborative projects that I’ve been involved with, a key role of the partners is to keep an eye on what’s happening to make sure the work is novel and relevant, and not duplicating something else; and they’re extremely good at that. Within COSI, we rely very heavily on Imperial Oil, both to keep us on track in terms of not to say what the research should be, but don’t duplicate work over here …

when we first got involved in the partnership with Imperial Oil and Exxon Mobil in the background, we thought “Well, Exxon Mobil, the biggest oil company in the world; we would hear a lot of ‘don’t do that, we’ve done it already.’” And that’s not what we got at all. When we thought we had interesting ideas, they were coming back with very reasoned suggestions, very helpful, which was an affirmation that we had an idea based on basic science that was novel, and also that they were helping to nudge it along to make sure that it didn’t duplicate work that had already been done, that was already well-known and that we didn’t miss connections that were out there that we should be making. So that’s been, in terms of the core science, there’s more involved in these collaborations with industry than you might think. It’s not just “How can we use the results” from the industry in our industrial operation, it’s also “Who else is working in these areas? What’s happening in terms of proprietary technology, not just refereed literature that the academics know so well.” So it’s an interesting counterpoint and complementary mindset.

As somebody who would like to see more development in Alberta and more value-added, I think it’s unfortunate and it’s unfortunate in ways that I don’t think people ever foresaw, and let me explain that. There’s the obvious economic impact. If you -- if you always ship the lowest-value-possible product, you’re foregoing potential benefits of value-added processing. Upgrading is manufacturing.

Refining is manufacturing, so if you’re always shipping the cheapest-possible raw material, you’re getting no economic benefit from any of the subsequent manufacturing steps. On the other hand, the challenge to that is you have to make money. You can’t just do it by government fiat because otherwise you get into all sorts of distortions, and a government decision isn’t enough to make it an activity that actually makes anybody any money. So you have to be cautious because we’ve seen this in upgrading of sometimes politically-driven decisions that don’t make economic sense, or that have risk cycles that people don’t fully understand. The other cost, though, is that the oil sands industry has now been demonized because of shipping diluted bitumen. In the United States, they think that bitumen is an awful material that is much, much worse than anything in petroleum; it’s radically different. Of course, it’s all nonsense. There is no -- bitumen is a petroleum material and diluted bitumen has most of the same toxicological and health properties of any crude oil material, but it’s been demonized as being unique and Canadian and bad, and environmentally damaging in every possible way. I’m not sure that that would happen if the proposition was “Let’s ship light, sweet, upgraded crude oil in a pipeline and there will be no diluted bitumen; it will be upgraded in Alberta and shipped as a light, sweet product”; I’m not sure if the political debate in the United States, in Vancouver and Victoria or in eastern Canada on the various pipeline proposals would be the same if the production was to come out as light, clean product versus …

The more informed people in BC, and I focus on BC because I actually identified this problem before the US turned down Keystone -- that Canada was heading for deep problems by having only the US as a customer; that it’s not rocket science to say having a single customer for a world-scale production is a bad idea …

In the last two or three years I’ve been getting much more involved in what bitumen does on these mineral surfaces and how they interact and what’s happening with the -- you mention nanoparticles; there are nanoparticles in bitumen. What they do on these interfaces, and what the implications of those interactions are -- one of the problems in the oil sands is, once you start sticking bitumen onto things, you never get it off again. And this is a huge issue for mineral recovery from the tailings. You can get potential minerals but, unfortunately, they’re all contaminated with bitumen, and in some cases that negates the value. So bitumen is the sticky point, literally.

A lot of the equipment that the nanotechnology institute has is focused on relatively hard materials -- some of the very high-end microscopes and so on. Ironically, where the Nanotechnology Institute’s capabilities have had the biggest impact is some of their simulation capabilities of being able to simulate how molecules interact, how nanoparticles behave. We’ve had a lot of collaboration between the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation and the modelling group at MIT, because they’ve developed some tools that are extremely valuable based on, I guess, the IT side of nanotechnology, rather than the hard experimental side. So we’ve had some very strong interactions there and they’ve helped to make some significant advances on how we understand the behaviour of how these large molecules interact with each other; how they cluster together to form nanoparticles; and how those nanoparticles start to interact with surfaces. These are areas where the simulation tools coming out of nanotechnology can make a real contribution.

The two main areas where I think we can make improvements are in non-aqueous extraction or water-free extraction to get away from wet tailings. Of all the work we’re doing, that’s the best single-prospect for dealing with water and tailings issues … just don’t make wet tailings in the first place. That, to me, has a simple appeal that is a powerful motivator and the science and technology that we’re developing looks very, very promising. That’s much more likely than finding a magic bullet for how to get water out of the tailings once you’ve created tailings. Once you’ve done that, everything is stacked against you. And this is what the industry has been butting its head up against since the 1980s when they first started putting a lot of effort into looking at tailings technologies. Now, the industry has been at it for 30 years to try and come up with better methods of getting the solids and the water separated ….

What we can’t change is the fundamental fact that bitumen is a fossil fuel material and, when you burn it, it will generate carbon dioxide, and so there’s some fundamental barriers that anything we do will not budge. So in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, we can whittle away at those but the bulk of those are still there when the end-user uses the fuel. And that doesn’t change at all with anything that we’re doing; so if you’re talking to someone whose biggest concern is greenhouse gases, we can nudge it so that it’s closer to other forms of energy, but we’re not going to eliminate it; we’re not going to make it CO2 neutral.

In very simple terms, getting a methane molecule out of matrix is much, much easier than getting a molecule of any liquid hydrocarbon. And so, from the point of view of physics, if you’ve got a very tight rock, getting methane out, to me, is orders of magnitude easier than getting octane out. And that’s the fundamental barrier -- that’s why I don’t get really what the prospects are for oil from shale, which is what is driving the bullish pronouncements out of the US. It’s not shale gas -- shale gas pretty well defies the economic scene to be understood. Getting oil out of the shale, the economics don’t seem to be understood well at all, and the prospects are even more confusing.

I think there’s a possibility of that if you don’t get off-shore. I’m not so convinced about shipping to eastern Canada as a prospect. It’s technically feasible; whether it really gets you out of the market bind is quite another question. But, if you can’t get to Asia, you’re limiting your prospects, in my opinion, and I’ve thought that for quite some time, because it’s -- as a national strategy having only one customer is a bad idea; for any commodity; for any product, for that matter. If you have the potential and you have willing interest in Asia -- it’s not that the Asian countries are not very interested, they just say, “Well, where’s your pipeline?” Without a pipeline there’s nothing to talk about.

The university is a fragile creature in many ways. If you don’t have the leaders intellectually, you can’t move ahead, and if you side-track them or if they get distracted, you can’t move ahead. So you need to have the right people with the right mental attitude in order to make these kinds of discoveries, and that’s the fragile aspect of a university. If you drive those people away, worst case, then it’s over; then you just can’t do it with the next tier. You can always fill a position but you’re not going to fill it with somebody who’s going to really take you and lead you forward in a particular area of research. And that’s what I think people that don’t know universities miss -- is they confuse hiring somebody with a PhD versus hiring somebody who really has that capacity to move it forward. It’s that exceptional whatever the percent is, 10 percent, one percent, something in that range of the researchers in university who really have the impact. There’s a lot of very good people but it’s very few people that have the spark that are really able to make things happen and really take a leadership role.

These are people that are not motivated primarily by their paycheque; they’re motivated by curiosity, by many other things -- academic ambition -- but it’s not primarily dollars and cents; it’s not a bottom-line type of mind set that makes a good researcher; and so if you give them the sense that it’s over, that things are going downhill …
 that you’re not going to invest in this area and that it’s not -- and if you’re doing something like an “across the board” cut for the entire post-secondary sector, this suggests that this is not a province that values these kinds of activities. That’s the danger and that’s the risk.

To get a faculty member to the point where they’re able to take a leadership role takes at least a decade. It’s not a one- or two-year thing, and you can’t bring people on and then let them go again. I used to hear from researchers, it takes you five years of research before you start asking the right questions, and probably ten years before you’re ready to start telling other people what they should be asking. It’s a long-term proposition, so it takes time to build up that enterprise. It doesn’t turn on a dime.
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Jean Steinhardt served as Librarian, Aramco Services, Engineering Division, for 13 years. He now heads Jean Steinhardt Consulting LLC, producing the same high quality research that he performed for Aramco.

Follow Jean’s blog at: http://desulf.blogspot.com/  for continuing tips on effective online research
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Sticky Wicket, Sticky Bitumen
Sticky wicket: A sticky wicket is a metaphor used to describe a difficult circumstance. It originated as a term for difficult circumstances in the sport of cricket, caused by a damp and soft pitch. (Wikipedia)
Sticky bitumen ... “one of the problems in the oil sands is, once you start sticking bitumen onto things, you never get it off again." -- Murray Gray

Back in 2009, I highlighted Dr. Murray Gray, an oil sands expert (https://desulf.blogspot.com/2009/05/murray-gray-specializing-in-canada-oil.html). Today, allow me to update you on his work since then.

TIP: Google® murray gray bitumen and browse a few of the resulting pages. One of the nuggets you will find is a very long list of his scholarly publications (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_sWnVwsAAAAJ&hl=en)

Dr. Gray’s LinkedIn page (https://ca.linkedin.com/in/murray-gray-2584757) includes a list of the positions he has held over the course of almost 40 years, including a stint in Qatar.

The most interesting item, however, is a 58-page transcript of an interview conducted as part of the Oil Sands Oral History Project.

While the focus is on the technical aspects of oil sands research, it is a wide ranging interview, touching on economics, politics, and institutional development.

IF you are interested in oil sands
IF you are interested in developing research partnerships between academia and industry
IF you are interested in the specific and detailed research problems involving bitumen
IF you are interested in the path from laboratory generated ideas to commercialization of those ideas

THEN you should read this interview. It will be well worth your time, because it is, in effect, a fascinating, insightful case study that addresses all these issues … and more.

You can access the entire interview at: https://glenbow.ucalgary.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Gray_Murray.pdf

Excerpts from the interview appear below.

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EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. MURRAY GRAY
https://glenbow.ucalgary.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Gray_Murray.pdf

I got involved at looking at potential petrochemical investments, because at that time everything was very bubbly and frothy in the energy industry … there were a lot of new natural gas discoveries coming on and no market. So the companies on the natural gas side of the industry were very interested in petrochemicals and other possibilities to try to bring their exploration results to market.

There was every possible energy source you can imagine being actively pursued because the world had realized that petroleum -- at that time people weren’t talking about petroleum running out, but the political issues with petroleum supply were first and foremost in everyone’s mind, so the challenge of secure supply was what was driving all of this effort.

The whole area of biomass hasn’t actually progressed very much since I was there. What’s really advanced is newer and better ways of using biomass as a straight fuel.

I like to draw a distinction in picking a general area and picking some of the highlights that are really close to a breakthrough where research would really make a difference, and I don’t think my capability is quite as good on that.

in my experience in the oil sands industry, the most important technology transfers -- the most significant transfers have been the people that are trained who have the background, who have the analytical skills. They then go out into the industry and start to have a significant impact. If I look at some of the most important developments that have hit the oil sands industry, a lot of it was very bright people who had been educated at the universities and then went to finishing school in industry, picked up the skills in terms of project management and how to do things on a larger scale and then things started to happen. So when you’re looking at these huge industries, the university is great for developing ideas, but then there’s a whole sequence of events that has to happen before it can be reduced to practice and become an important part of an industry. And often the idea, valuable as it is, it may be many years before it comes to fruition as a fully-developed process concept. If I look at most of the technologies, it really transformed the oil sands industry over the last two decades. In many cases, there were interesting lab observations or ideas that then took an awful lot of hard work to go through piloting and scale up. So technology transfer in the oil sands industry to me takes on a very [different] connotation than if you talk to people in information technologies where if you come up with a brilliant idea for a cell phone app, you can go and commercialize it almost right away. The cycle and the amount of effort and investment and time required for energy production of any kind is much, much longer and much more arduous.

When we talked about upgrading, Syncrude was really the only game in town. The other companies that were interested in oil sands were much more focused on primary production -- companies like Imperial Oil, at the time was very much into in situ production. That was their major focus. Syncrude was the company that was interested in extraction, working with Jacob Masliyah, and interested in upgrading working with me and a few others. And so through AOSTRA I got to know the different companies, what their interests were and some of the leading researchers at those companies. In particular, I focused on Syncrude because they had a research centre here in Edmonton, and still do. It’s a very active research centre, and here was a group that was speaking the language of research in oil sands here in Edmonton and that was a wonderful opportunity.
[NOTE:
syncrude.ca
Syncrude Canada Ltd. is one of the world's largest producers of synthetic crude oil from oil sands and the largest single source producer in Canada. Wikipedia
Headquarters: Fort McMurray, Canada
Number of employees: 4,800 (2016)
Founded: December 1964
Owners: Suncor Energy, Imperial Oil, CNOOC Petroleum North America ULC, Sinopec
Type of business: Joint venture]

Initially the main contact with Syncrude was through Joe Liu, and he had an interesting role at Syncrude Research, which has persisted. They’ve always had somebody who was primarily interested in external partnerships and liaisons. So Joe Liu’s role was to link in with the AOSTRA program, to link in with the university labs and the government labs that were doing relevant research, and to try and generate productive relationships as much as possible, and to get the best value out of those partnerships for Syncrude, which is a fair proposition. The other people were Emerson Sanford, who was a group leader working on upgrading research at that time, and so through AOSTRA and the meetings that were held every year in Banff at that time I got to know some of those people and to start talking more about research relationships. Eventually, AOSTRA wound down most of its activities. The university program was handed off briefly and then it disappeared; and, around the same time that AOSTRA disappeared, Syncrude decided that they wanted to put more investment into collaborative research, so they explicitly redirected their effort away from doing as much as possible in-house into a more distributive model. And so the first people they came and started talking to were some of the researchers who’d been very active with AOSTRA. Jacob Masliyah had been active working directly with Syncrude on developing some of their process models for the extraction process. I’d been working with AOSTRA and a couple of other people had been working with people like Norbert Morgenstern -- had been doing a lot of work in the oil sands industry on a consulting and research basis. So there was a nucleus of people who had the background and the appreciation of the industry based on AOSTRA’s investment. Syncrude could come in and start working directly. So the interesting thing at that time is the province had basically bowed out of active research in this area, basically wound down to little or no effort, and it was the combination of Syncrude plus the Government of Canada through partnership programs of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council that really launched the much-stronger university/industry partnerships that moved forward at the University of Alberta. The AOSTRA partnerships were pretty loose. There was a university program with an industry steering committee. The industry people would dutifully attend the annual conferences and it was a good way to meet and make contacts, but it wasn’t really a partnership. There were partnership activities going on the side but what really launched the flourishing ecosystem that we see now at the University of Alberta was Syncrude basically saying, “We want to have longer term partnerships; we want to step away from short-term contracts and move into longer-term research that’ll really develop trained graduate students and a focused effort over a sustained period of time.” And they were able to leverage their investment with the Government of Canada.

The other thing that’s been essential is sustained commitment and strategic long-term investment, and so AOSTRA was very strategic but then AOSTRA disappeared and, ironically, during one of the key periods in how this whole effort has developed at the University of Alberta, the Government of Alberta bowed out of the picture and it was largely a federal partnership with industry directly that allowed us at the University of Alberta to build up dramatically in terms of our capacity. Moving from short-term consulting-type contracts to five-year commitments for sustained research was a huge breakthrough for us, and we were able to deliver much more value, I think, to the company partners than we were on a short-term collaborative basis.

At the time Otto Strausz was very actively working on understanding the chemistry of the oil sands, but Otto is not a chemical engineer and so the gap that I immediately observed is Otto was -- Otto Strausz and his team were generating huge amounts of chemical information but they were struggling to relate it to how the industry actually operated. And so the work that I was doing was trying to come up with tools and relationships; how could we take a chemical reactor running at Syncrude, for example, and use some of the insight on the chemistry to do a better job? How could we raise our understanding of this very complicated bitumen material to do a better job of processing the bitumen into value-added fuels? And so that was the -- that’s basically the area where I’ve been working ever since, broadly defined. What are the -- what’s the composition? What are the properties of this material? How does that dictate how large-scale industrial equipment operates? What can we do in the lab to better understand how to push that technology forward?

What I value the most from my time is coming up with a much better understanding of the composition of bitumen from an engineering perspective, not a detailed physical chemical series of measurements, but how do we understand this material at the level of detail that we can then use it to analyse a large-scale process? And most of what I’ve been working on is what we call upgrading, which is taking the bitumen after the hot-water process, after it’s been cleaned up, and then try to do something useful with it because nobody really wants the bitumen. Well, I shouldn’t say that, we’re selling more and more diluted bitumen but it’s really not a desirable end-product. It needs dramatic processing in order to make valuable transportation fuels. And so what I think I’ve done -- the biggest contribution is on trying to understand how, what we know about chemistry applies or does not apply well to this complicated mixture. What happens when you start processing this kind of feed stock at temperatures over 400 degrees centigrade at high pressure? What are the catalysts really doing and what are the components within the bitumen that really control that whole process? Ironically, I think it’s really only been in the last two or three years that I’m satisfied personally that I’ve answered those questions thoroughly, and that we’ve really set the scientific basis for process technologies for this material. Empirically, people were building and operating these things for many, many years but now we finally nailed the details of the chemical science to the point where we can really integrate what’s the basic chemistry with how do these reactors operate. In the past, when I first got involved in oil sands, there was no agreement on what the important components where, what the real reaction pathways were; if you put a catalyst in, what was it really doing? And so half the time you were operating in the dark. You were making guesses. Sometimes people were making inspired guesses; sometimes they were totally and utterly wrong about what was happening, but they had -- they had empirical information and they were doing their best to link what they were putting [in] with what they were getting out. What I think I’ve been able to contribute the most is making the link between those two. If this is what you’ve got, this is what you can hope for; this is about the best you can do; and what are the pathways in between -- how can you try and make it better?

Well, one example is we realized that bitumen is a liquid material and the history of chemical-reaction engineering, my core discipline, is they don’t really like liquids very much. Liquids are awkward. A lot of the work was done on ice gas streams. Gas is much better behaved, so it’s low density; the reaction pathways are much, much simpler in the gas phase, and so a lot of people’s understanding was all based on the fundamentals of gas-phase chemical reactors. Syncrude, Suncor, they don’t operate gas-phase conversion units for bitumen; you cannot put that material into the gas phase, it’s always liquid. And so understanding how materials like coke develop; how the different components react and change, I think that’s where I’ve made the most contribution. That’s been the most exciting thing for me. So for Syncrude, we did some very significant work on understanding how the large molecules broke apart and what those fragments were doing in the liquid phase versus if we could get them into the vapour phase. And so we came up with some innovative lab-scale reactors that said how can we get those cracked fragments into the vapour phase as fast as possible? What does that do to the yield and what does it do to the quality of the products? What we found is, if you can get the molecules to crack and into the vapour phase as fast as possible, you get much less coke by-product; you get more liquid product and you get better quality. So that got Syncrude and other companies thinking along a whole different direction. What could they do with process technologies in order to do better? So Syncrude is still working on process improvements. How can they put the liquid feed into their reactor to get those crap products out as fast as possible? Other companies, there’s a small company called Envision Technologies that was developed by a couple of former Syncrude employees, they took some of our ideas with some completely novel ideas of their own and have developed a new reactor technology to try and get more product out of this raw material using some of these ideas based on these lab experiments. So sometimes if you get a good scientific or applied engineering observation, other people will come up with interesting ways of using it that the discoverer would never have foreseen, and that’s certainly been my experience in this case.
[NOTE:
Press Release
Date: January 25, 2006
Envision Technologies Corp. creates dedicated entity focused on the ETX Upgrader design

CALGARY, AB – Gerard Monaghan, CEO of ETX Systems is pleased to announce the creation of ETX Systems Inc. The company, a private entity incorporated under the laws of Alberta has the sole mandate to demonstrate and commercialize the ETX Upgrader. Development of the ETX Reactor was carried out under Envision Technologies Corp. In support of the mandate of the new company all tangible and intangible assets associated with the ETX Reactor technology will be transferred to ETX Systems.

"Under Envision Technologies Corp. we pursued a number of business opportunities of which the ETX Reactor was one.", Mr. Monaghan explains. "We were using the company not only to evaluate technologies but also as a vehicle through which to perform consulting activities. To properly execute our business plan we required a legal entity that is focused only on the single ETX Reactor asset."

A private offering is planned to capitalize ETX Systems Inc. The funds will be used to carry out a number of projects critical to achieving the commercialization of the technology. The funds will also be used to set up basic supporting infrastructure.

ETX Systems Inc. is a fit-for-purpose private entity based in Calgary, AB, whose sole mandate is to commercialize its patented IYQ Upgrading technology. The process claims to deliver revolutionary yields and qualities relative to delayed coking, for significantly less cost per barrel. The increased production of high quality liquids leads to reduced environmental impact, leveraged through both the upstream and downstream scope.  For more information contact Gerard Monaghan, CEO of ETX Systems Inc. (gerard.monaghan@etxsystems.com ).
TIP: Google envision technologies reactor
source: http://etxsystems.com/pr/etx_pr060125.shtml ]

Envision Technologies went out and built a pilot plant out at Devon at the Canmet facilities there in order to test their ideas of how they could combine an innovative reactor concept with some of the results of the work that we had done here at the University of Alberta. My involvement at that point was more as an advisor to give them feedback on their process design to try and point out issues they should be worried about based on our experience in the lab, and so there was a good collaboration in that, but it was, I wasn’t driving that process. But it was fascinating to see the series of steps and some of the struggles they had to go through scale-up to get up to a scale of about one-barrel-a-day of feed stock. Things that we don’t even think about in a lab become crucial when you go to a larger scale of operation, and it impressed on me, as I mentioned to you earlier, the long and arduous path from an interesting idea in the lab to a technology that is ready for application in industry. There’s an awful lot of effort and time, and money, that have to go into that transition.

In the upgrading world the main by-product of concern is what we call coke. This is a solid by-product from bitumen when you heat it up and crack the molecules just by applying heat. The objective, in terms of making a more valuable processor, [is] to minimize the yield of coke as much as you can. And so what I described to you earlier about understanding what happened in the liquid phase versus vapour phase, understanding how these molecules actually behave is crucial to understanding how can you manipulate the bitumen to get as little coke as possible? Now, before I ever learned about any of this, some of the major approaches had been developed empirically and some of that work went back to the 1930s, which was when a lot of the early refining technology development was done. In the United States and Germany they came up with the two major approaches. You either take these large molecules and heat them up, or you take these large molecules, don’t heat them up quite as much, but add hydrogen in a catalyst -- hydrogen gas. Those were the two main pathways and today those are the two main pathways. That continues to be the bulk of what the industry is doing; or that’s actually all that the industry is doing and they haven’t broken out of that mold. And so the challenge has always been --how far can you, given the molecular structure, how far can you push either of those technologies to get either as little coke as possible or as much liquid product in the hydrogenation pathway with as little cost as possible? So it’s, in a sense you could argue it’s all just been optimization of an idea that was already there from 80 years ago. But that’s, that’s often the way these studies go.

The interesting thing with the collaboration with Imperial Oil, was -- that whole effort grew out of some conversations between the then President of Imperial Oil in Canada, the President of the University of Alberta Rod Fraser, and David Lynch, Dean of Engineering, and at that time Exxon Mobil, the parent company, was investing in some major initiatives at Stanford University in a collaborative mode with other companies, and they said, “Well, you can go and talk to them,” and the University of Alberta was pushing back and saying “No, no, no, you should come and work with us on oil sands because we are the place where things are happening. We shouldn’t be a little flea on the program at Stanford, that doesn’t make any sense, and that doesn’t do justice to the potential of the oil sands.” And so through discussions, the idea for the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation came about where there would be an endowment established, funded by Imperial Oil, and the university would then go and get operating funds, as well as using the income from the endowment to have long-term, sustained effort on oil sands research. The most important part of that from my perspective is not just the model of how it happened, but the explicit recognition by Imperial Oil at that point that they were not happy with the available technology. So they were very upfront. They did not see that they could still use the same technology 20, 30, 40, 50 years out.

The resource was there; the oil was there; they had the leases; they had the mine plans, but they -- their position was they couldn’t continue to use the technology as they had at that time. They needed new approaches and so they, they wanted COSI [Canadian Oil Sands Innovation] to be a sort of “skunk” works to try, even if they were off-the-wall, if they made sense potentially, if you could get the idea to work, if it made sense in terms of a new opportunity for the industry, they were willing to try almost anything as long as there was a path of how that idea could possibly be translated into practice.

They saw some big differences. Well, two things -- they saw some big differences between oil sands and in the mining side and their work on in situ. So part of the scope of COSI was to focus it only on mining extraction and upgrading of the minable oil sands. They thought, and they still think, they knew what were the opportunities; what were the potentials of all the in situ technologies. They were continuing to develop them and are focused on developing their own technology today. So they didn’t feel they needed university help in that. Where they needed help was this problem of how do you come up with completely new technologies; how do you try ideas; and so they saw having a university partnership as a way of dramatically amplifying what they could do themselves. Doesn’t mean they gave up on that question themselves; they’ve continued to look at alternative technologies, completely different ways of doing things. But they see the university collaboration as an important adjunct to that. And part of it is also that COSIA is not just University of Alberta; it’s led by the University of Alberta but we engage other universities as well where there’s capability, and where there’s particular ideas available that we can try and build on.

As an example, let me give you an idea of what the status of COSI is today. We’re working on three major programs, three major themes. The one that’s been longest standing that we identified right away was what you might call “water-free” extraction. How can we get the bitumen out without using warm water, without generating tailings ponds to get around rather than trying to fix the tailings problem: how can we get out of it all together; which is a good engineering approach -- don’t just look at the end of the pipe; go back to the beginning and say “Well, what could you do differently?” So we’ve been working on a variety of projects to understand how solvents and bitumen and oil sands components interact; how can we get the bitumen out and recover solvents in a process that has potential to be most efficient and environmentally responsible. And that’s looking extremely promising and that’s our -- one of our biggest and most important areas, and where Imperial Oil has been working along in parallel working towards being ready for a pilot type of demonstration plant to actually take it to a commercial scale. So that one is looking promising, although they’ve been a little coy at saying -- until they make the decision they won’t say when they will make the decision to go ahead with a major investment. But we’re getting close to the point where the next stage would be a 50-million-dollar pilot.

Second theme that we developed right from the start was upgrading. What can we do to the bitumen that would bypass the known limitations of the two main pathways that are available? Heat it up or heat it up with hydrogen. We know what those do. Those two pathways COSI doesn’t touch. We look instead at what are alternate ways of trying to get more effective and -- both environmentally-effective and cost-effective upgrading technologies. The final area that we’ve been developing most recently in contradiction to what I just said is tailings. Because of the importance of the tailings to the mining industry, we’re now doing some work on tailings working in partnership with multiple companies; so non-aqueous extraction and upgrading are both in partnership with Imperial Oil. The work that we’re doing now on aqueous tailings is with the whole industry. We’re partnering with COSIA, which is why we probably have to change the name of COSI -- it’s the Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance -- all of the industry partners have got together and said they’re going to share all their technology on oil sands tailings and so we’re working with that group of companies to try and see if we can come up with a better way of dealing with tailings. That’s a big challenge but it’s such an important topic to the industry that we’re trying to help out. My personal opinion, it’s probably the longest shot of the three in terms of making a commitment, or I should say making a significant contribution. So in the non-aqueous case I think we’re making great progress and I think the indications are that Imperial Oil should commit to a pilot because it looks very promising. In the area of upgrading, we haven’t been quite as successful. We’ve been trying a whole series of areas, some of which have been dead ends, like the -- well, COSI didn’t sponsor the biotechnology work, but that kind of an idea where you say “Let’s take a graduate student, try something out, see if it works; if it doesn’t work, then, we’ll go on to something else.” So we’ve had a fair bit of that, looking at possible upgrading pathways. The most promising area right now is some radically-novel catalysts that are being developed in the chemistry department here at the University of Alberta that are -- that have the potential to completely change how an upgrader operates in terms of the temperatures and pressures required to make use of hydrogen. So it is at hydrogen, that pathway, but it would be at low-pressure, low temperature if these catalysts prove up the way their initial indications are showing. This would be a radically-different way of trying to process bitumen. In terms of other industry partners, we’ve got a partner working in Germany coming up -- that’s the project that’s just wrapping up; they’ve been making molecules that represent some of the big molecules that we think are in bitumen and understanding better how they behave. We’ve had some very good work with Christian Detellier at the University of Ottawa who’s a leading expert on clay materials because the clays are so important in oil sands, and so he’s been doing a lot of work on how clays and bitumen interact, and what can we do to change that interaction to do better recovery processing? We’ve been working with University of British Columbia doing some very fundamental work on understanding what happens at mineral interfaces. We know we have sand and clay interfaces; what do the bitumen molecules really do on those interfaces? And so the lab of Keng Chou at University of British Columbia has the ability to actually look at those surfaces in ways that I’d never conceived of before we got him to start thinking about this problem. So these are examples of some of the expertise that we brought in on these projects.

A lot of what we’ve been trying to do through COSI -- my most recent effort has been to try and set up teams and keep them talking to each other, and this is one of the biggest problems that we have at the university. It’s easy to often get a graduate, get a professor, starting on an area. They’ll get graduate students involved, but they don’t necessarily keep in touch with their colleagues down the hall working on related projects. So one of the challenges with a centre like COSI is to have regular points of contact so that we push the researchers to talk to each other, we make sure that they’re aware of what the lab down the hall is doing, so they’re trying to work cooperatively as much as possible, and that we try and avoid having them develop into silos where they’re working on an area and not communicating back and forth. And that continues to be a problem, although we have a huge amount of oil sands research. To some extent, the individual professors reach out and make linkages outside of their own particular group, but to some extent the industry partners serve that function because they don’t tolerate silos very well. And so a company like Syncrude, they’re involved in multiple projects; they serve a crucial role of helping to make sure that there isn’t duplication and that the work is complementary; and in some ways they’re better positioned to do that than the academic researchers; there’s limitations on what we can do in terms of sharing information back and forth within the university; time limitations as well as the way academia works. So if I look at the collaborative projects that I’ve been involved with, a key role of the partners is to keep an eye on what’s happening to make sure the work is novel and relevant, and not duplicating something else; and they’re extremely good at that. Within COSI, we rely very heavily on Imperial Oil, both to keep us on track in terms of not to say what the research should be, but don’t duplicate work over here …

when we first got involved in the partnership with Imperial Oil and Exxon Mobil in the background, we thought “Well, Exxon Mobil, the biggest oil company in the world; we would hear a lot of ‘don’t do that, we’ve done it already.’” And that’s not what we got at all. When we thought we had interesting ideas, they were coming back with very reasoned suggestions, very helpful, which was an affirmation that we had an idea based on basic science that was novel, and also that they were helping to nudge it along to make sure that it didn’t duplicate work that had already been done, that was already well-known and that we didn’t miss connections that were out there that we should be making. So that’s been, in terms of the core science, there’s more involved in these collaborations with industry than you might think. It’s not just “How can we use the results” from the industry in our industrial operation, it’s also “Who else is working in these areas? What’s happening in terms of proprietary technology, not just refereed literature that the academics know so well.” So it’s an interesting counterpoint and complementary mindset.

As somebody who would like to see more development in Alberta and more value-added, I think it’s unfortunate and it’s unfortunate in ways that I don’t think people ever foresaw, and let me explain that. There’s the obvious economic impact. If you -- if you always ship the lowest-value-possible product, you’re foregoing potential benefits of value-added processing. Upgrading is manufacturing.

Refining is manufacturing, so if you’re always shipping the cheapest-possible raw material, you’re getting no economic benefit from any of the subsequent manufacturing steps. On the other hand, the challenge to that is you have to make money. You can’t just do it by government fiat because otherwise you get into all sorts of distortions, and a government decision isn’t enough to make it an activity that actually makes anybody any money. So you have to be cautious because we’ve seen this in upgrading of sometimes politically-driven decisions that don’t make economic sense, or that have risk cycles that people don’t fully understand. The other cost, though, is that the oil sands industry has now been demonized because of shipping diluted bitumen. In the United States, they think that bitumen is an awful material that is much, much worse than anything in petroleum; it’s radically different. Of course, it’s all nonsense. There is no -- bitumen is a petroleum material and diluted bitumen has most of the same toxicological and health properties of any crude oil material, but it’s been demonized as being unique and Canadian and bad, and environmentally damaging in every possible way. I’m not sure that that would happen if the proposition was “Let’s ship light, sweet, upgraded crude oil in a pipeline and there will be no diluted bitumen; it will be upgraded in Alberta and shipped as a light, sweet product”; I’m not sure if the political debate in the United States, in Vancouver and Victoria or in eastern Canada on the various pipeline proposals would be the same if the production was to come out as light, clean product versus …

The more informed people in BC, and I focus on BC because I actually identified this problem before the US turned down Keystone -- that Canada was heading for deep problems by having only the US as a customer; that it’s not rocket science to say having a single customer for a world-scale production is a bad idea …

In the last two or three years I’ve been getting much more involved in what bitumen does on these mineral surfaces and how they interact and what’s happening with the -- you mention nanoparticles; there are nanoparticles in bitumen. What they do on these interfaces, and what the implications of those interactions are -- one of the problems in the oil sands is, once you start sticking bitumen onto things, you never get it off again. And this is a huge issue for mineral recovery from the tailings. You can get potential minerals but, unfortunately, they’re all contaminated with bitumen, and in some cases that negates the value. So bitumen is the sticky point, literally.

A lot of the equipment that the nanotechnology institute has is focused on relatively hard materials -- some of the very high-end microscopes and so on. Ironically, where the Nanotechnology Institute’s capabilities have had the biggest impact is some of their simulation capabilities of being able to simulate how molecules interact, how nanoparticles behave. We’ve had a lot of collaboration between the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation and the modelling group at MIT, because they’ve developed some tools that are extremely valuable based on, I guess, the IT side of nanotechnology, rather than the hard experimental side. So we’ve had some very strong interactions there and they’ve helped to make some significant advances on how we understand the behaviour of how these large molecules interact with each other; how they cluster together to form nanoparticles; and how those nanoparticles start to interact with surfaces. These are areas where the simulation tools coming out of nanotechnology can make a real contribution.

The two main areas where I think we can make improvements are in non-aqueous extraction or water-free extraction to get away from wet tailings. Of all the work we’re doing, that’s the best single-prospect for dealing with water and tailings issues … just don’t make wet tailings in the first place. That, to me, has a simple appeal that is a powerful motivator and the science and technology that we’re developing looks very, very promising. That’s much more likely than finding a magic bullet for how to get water out of the tailings once you’ve created tailings. Once you’ve done that, everything is stacked against you. And this is what the industry has been butting its head up against since the 1980s when they first started putting a lot of effort into looking at tailings technologies. Now, the industry has been at it for 30 years to try and come up with better methods of getting the solids and the water separated ….

What we can’t change is the fundamental fact that bitumen is a fossil fuel material and, when you burn it, it will generate carbon dioxide, and so there’s some fundamental barriers that anything we do will not budge. So in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, we can whittle away at those but the bulk of those are still there when the end-user uses the fuel. And that doesn’t change at all with anything that we’re doing; so if you’re talking to someone whose biggest concern is greenhouse gases, we can nudge it so that it’s closer to other forms of energy, but we’re not going to eliminate it; we’re not going to make it CO2 neutral.

In very simple terms, getting a methane molecule out of matrix is much, much easier than getting a molecule of any liquid hydrocarbon. And so, from the point of view of physics, if you’ve got a very tight rock, getting methane out, to me, is orders of magnitude easier than getting octane out. And that’s the fundamental barrier -- that’s why I don’t get really what the prospects are for oil from shale, which is what is driving the bullish pronouncements out of the US. It’s not shale gas -- shale gas pretty well defies the economic scene to be understood. Getting oil out of the shale, the economics don’t seem to be understood well at all, and the prospects are even more confusing.

I think there’s a possibility of that if you don’t get off-shore. I’m not so convinced about shipping to eastern Canada as a prospect. It’s technically feasible; whether it really gets you out of the market bind is quite another question. But, if you can’t get to Asia, you’re limiting your prospects, in my opinion, and I’ve thought that for quite some time, because it’s -- as a national strategy having only one customer is a bad idea; for any commodity; for any product, for that matter. If you have the potential and you have willing interest in Asia -- it’s not that the Asian countries are not very interested, they just say, “Well, where’s your pipeline?” Without a pipeline there’s nothing to talk about.

The university is a fragile creature in many ways. If you don’t have the leaders intellectually, you can’t move ahead, and if you side-track them or if they get distracted, you can’t move ahead. So you need to have the right people with the right mental attitude in order to make these kinds of discoveries, and that’s the fragile aspect of a university. If you drive those people away, worst case, then it’s over; then you just can’t do it with the next tier. You can always fill a position but you’re not going to fill it with somebody who’s going to really take you and lead you forward in a particular area of research. And that’s what I think people that don’t know universities miss -- is they confuse hiring somebody with a PhD versus hiring somebody who really has that capacity to move it forward. It’s that exceptional whatever the percent is, 10 percent, one percent, something in that range of the researchers in university who really have the impact. There’s a lot of very good people but it’s very few people that have the spark that are really able to make things happen and really take a leadership role.

These are people that are not motivated primarily by their paycheque; they’re motivated by curiosity, by many other things -- academic ambition -- but it’s not primarily dollars and cents; it’s not a bottom-line type of mind set that makes a good researcher; and so if you give them the sense that it’s over, that things are going downhill …
 that you’re not going to invest in this area and that it’s not -- and if you’re doing something like an “across the board” cut for the entire post-secondary sector, this suggests that this is not a province that values these kinds of activities. That’s the danger and that’s the risk.

To get a faculty member to the point where they’re able to take a leadership role takes at least a decade. It’s not a one- or two-year thing, and you can’t bring people on and then let them go again. I used to hear from researchers, it takes you five years of research before you start asking the right questions, and probably ten years before you’re ready to start telling other people what they should be asking. It’s a long-term proposition, so it takes time to build up that enterprise. It doesn’t turn on a dime.
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Jean Steinhardt served as Librarian, Aramco Services, Engineering Division, for 13 years. He now heads Jean Steinhardt Consulting LLC, producing the same high quality research that he performed for Aramco.

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