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After 50 years of fresh water use for Enhanced Oil Recovery -
Advances in Fresh Water Awareness
Will this movement keep flowing?
The following companies are reducing water already:
| ConocoPhillips |
is saving over 3,000,000 litres/day or 240,900,000 Gallons/year by choosing to use saline Water in two oil fields
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| Penn West |
is reporting satisfactory results by using carbon dioxide for oil enhanced recovery
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| Northrock Energy |
is reducing its use of fresh water by using produced water and has the infrastructure ready for larger volumes of produced water
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| Murphy Oil |
by using saline water in one of its waterflood operations is saving 500,000 litres a day or 40,150,000 Gallons a year
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| Newalta Recycling Corporation |
made a decision to modify their operation and recycle their existing allotment. It will save 5,675,000 Litres of fresh water per year
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| Petro Canada |
- saves by re-injecting all produced water
- is currently saving 80,000 litres/day of original license volumes
- went to considerable expense in building a water treatment plant to be prepared to use water from other sources
- expects considerable reduction in fresh water usage over time
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Article published by the Red Deer Advocate August 25, 3003
Encouraging efforts to save our fresh water
Good on the Provincial Government for showing a strong interest in moving quickly on concerns too much of the province's fresh water is being sacrificed to produce oil.
Studies, hearings and reports have traditionally been a stalling technique employed to sidetrack citizen concerns over issues that look too expensive, unpalatable or just too hot politically to actually act upon.
You can't make good policy without good information, of course, but there's no doubt "we're studying the issue and a report will come out later," has often come to mean "will you please go away."
This spring, after due study and consultation, the province issued a draft report on what will become our strategy for laws governing water use. Draft reports - which can come years before the final report, which comes before recommendations, which may or may not become party policy and then new laws - can actually be quite useful.
In the case of water use by Alberta's energy industry the draft report noted concerns that a variety of parties were all saying the same thing about the practice of pumping fresh water down oilwells in order to push the oil out. They said that in the long term it's a bad idea.
A third hot, dry summer has focused everyone's attention on the importance of fresh water, even that of The Government. The Environment Minister Lorne Taylor struck up a committee to look at how much water oil and gas companies should be allowed to use to stimulate energy production and he did it, pre-empting his own Government's greater study on water strategy. A strong consensus favoring water-use limits already exists, and the minister doesn't want to wait for the full report before acting.
When fresh water (water from nearby wells, mostly) is sent deep into the earth's crust to create pressure forcing oil and gas out of the porous rock formations, it's lost forever from the hydrological cycle. It will take eons for that water to flow in a stream again, or to ever fall as rain anywhere.
At present the industry is allowed to license 4.6 percent of the ground water available, though generally, only about half that much is ever used.
Still that water is gone forever and the total reserve is thereby diminished. Strangely, though, nobody's really sure what the exact freshwater reserves really are in Alberta. That's just more for us to study.
Just the same, in periods of drought and falling water tables everywhere, it's easy to see that losing water reserves cannot be sustained.
Another area of consensus surrounds public/private partnerships to find something else to pump into the ground to create the pressure needed to get the oil out. One technology involves pumping down carbon dioxide at high pressure. It's a more expensive method. Plus, there are other problems to solve, but in the oilpatch, where there is a will, there is a way.
We can debate just how much tax money is reasonable to spend finding better ways for oil companies to make a profit without all our water wells eventually going dry.
One argument in favor of using tax money to explore this option is that we can gain serious points with the federal government on Kyoto policy by securing carbon dioxide deep into the earth.
Overall, it is indeed hopeful that once the alarms were raised publicly about the 210 billion or so litres of water lost from our aquifer every year, the government chose not to hide behind a study, which they easily could have done.
Six months to a year from now, Albertans should expect not just a report from a committee, but draft legislation to put the report into action.
For a government, that is almost a gallop. It shows that the system works, when you want it.
- Greg Neiman
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