Heavy Oil Production Solutions

A SAGD commercial facility located north of Fort McMurray, Alberta produced approximately 11,000 bbl/day of bitumen oil. Alberta environmental regulations require recycling the produced water for use in drum boilers, resulting in strict produced water quality guidelines in order to maintain plant asset integrity and performance. As well as chemical costs, the customer was also trucking out large volumes of slop oil offsite. The large amount of fine clays and solids strengthened the emulsion in the slop oil, resulting in trucking costs averaging $400,000 per year. The water treating program successfully improved the customer’s return on investment by an annualized $600,000 per year.

The Suncor Firebag thermal recovery project relies on mechanical vapor compression (MVC) evaporators for distillate as a source of feedwater for the once-through steam generators (OTSG). Suncor experiences periods of very high levels of hardness, metals, silica and organics, which makes it much more challenging to maintain the quality of water feeding into the evaporator.During the evolution of the evaporator chemical cleaning program, Suncor Firebag has made modifications to their demister pad cleaning program and mode of operation that improved the overall performance of the evaporators.

A major SAGD producer in Northern Alberta was experiencing routine fouling in their produced water heat exchangers, resulting in the exchangers being taken off line and manually cleaned up to two times per week. Since the application of EMBR11677A, the producer has decreased the need for exchanger cleaning to an average of once every 90 days. Additionally, this application has reduced the requirement for firing Once Through Steam Generators (OTSGs) and the resulting savings on fuel gas and greenhouse gas production.