The World’s First Direct To Fuels Bitumen Refinery

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it” -- Albert Einstein (German born American Physicist, 1879-1955)

Like a beachcomber who finds a valuable bit of flotsam, I am always thrilled to find a free, full text article on the Web that stimulates my imagination.  The article below is one of my recent finds …

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Energy Procedia 37 ( 2013 ) 7046 – 7055, doi: 10.1016/j.egypro.2013.06.641, GHGT-11
North West Sturgeon Refinery Project Overview – Carbon Capture Through Innovative Commercial Structuring in the Canadian Oil Sands
Kevin Heal & Terry Kemp
North West Redwater Partnership, 2800, 140 4th Avenue S.W., Calgary, Alberta, T2P3N3, Canada
Abstract
North West Redwater Partnership (NWR) is building the world’s first direct to fuels bitumen refinery to combine gasification technology with an integrated carbon capture and storage program. When complete, the first phase of the refinery will produce a range of refined petroleum products with the advantage of having both higher added value and a lower carbon footprint than traditional upgraders or refineries. This project overview will profile the NWR project and discuss the innovative technological approach to incorporate large scale carbon capture in a greenfield Canadian oil sands development.

The NWR opportunity is to break the pattern of making SCO and then sending it to the US for additional processing. Instead, NWR will build a one-step bitumen refinery in the petrochemical cluster of Alberta’s Industrial Heartland that will operate efficiently on all of Alberta’s non-mined bitumen sources to produce marketable products in a single facility. One step conversion has significant cost and environmental advantages and reduces the risks of structural market changes for NWR’s product slate.

The business premise for the NWSR is thus to capture the price spread between heavy bitumen blend crude oil and high value finished products. Despite being a major energy producer, Western Canada is a net importer of distillate products such as diesel. As shown in Figure 3, there is a substantial premium between diesel, a primary product for NWR, and bitumen. The recent growth of oil sands production has increased the industrial need for fuels and refined products, including diesel and also condensate, another core NWR product, which is used to dilute u bitumen and heavy oil for pipeline transportation. This provides a sound investment basis for the NWSR project.
Free Full Text Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876610213008849?np=y 
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