Tar sands and oil shale in crude oil production.

1. TAR SANDS AND OIL
SHALE
 Amar Chand
 Akhilesh Mishra
 Akshit Tripathi
 Akul Jain
 Ankit Kumar
IIT Roorkee

2. TAR SANDS

3. INTRODUCTION
Oil sand is either loose sand or partially consolidated
sandstone containing a naturally occurring mixture of sand,
clay, and water, saturated with a dense and extremely
viscous form of petroleum technically referred to as
bitumen.

4. Glimpses of Tar Sands
mines

7. History
• First sources discovered by Geological Survey of
Canada in Alberta in 1884.
• Several extraction plants were established later in 20th
Century in Canada.
• Demand highly increased during World War.
• Alberta, Canada is currently second largest source of
Tar sands, after Saudi Arabia.

8. Amount of deposits

9. Composition
• Formed from biodegradation and water-washing of
light crude due to lack of cap rock
• 10-20% bitumen
• 80-85% mineral matter including sands, clays
• 4-6% water.
• Yield liquid hydrocarbons, upon further processing,
can be converted to furnished petroleum products.

10. Oil sand production
methods
• The oil sand industry uses two major methods to
produce oil from bituminous sands
• 1. Open Pit mining
• 2. In-situ mining: Several process are used for this such
as:
o Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage(SAGD)
o Cyclic Steam Stimulation
o Toe to Heel Injection

11. Open-pit mining
• Approximately 20% of the oil sands lie close enough to the earth’s
surface to be mined, which impacts 3% of the surface area of the oil
sands region.
• Open-pit mining is similar to many coal-mining operations. Large
shovels scoop the oil sands into trucks, which take it to crushers,
where the large clumps of clay are broken down. The oil sand is
then mixed with water and transported by pipeline to a plant, where
the bitumen is separated from the other components.
• Tailings ponds are an operating facility common to all types of
surface mining. In the oil sands, tailings consisting of water, sand,
clay and residual oil are pumped to these basins – or ponds – where
settling occurs and water is recycled for reuse in the process. When
the ponds are no longer required, the land is reclaimed.

13. In-situ drilling
• The majority of the oil sands lie more than 70 metres (200
feet) below the ground, and are too deep to be mined. These
reserves can be recovered in situ (in place) by drilling wells. In
situ drilling accounts for 80% of oil sands reserves and these
reserves are located below 97% of the land in the oil sands
sector.
• Drilling methods disturb a small amount of land and do not
require tailings ponds. Advanced technology is used to inject
steam, combustion or other sources of heat into the reservoir.
The heat warms the bitumen so it can be pumped to the
surface through recovery wells.
• Advances in technology, such as directional drilling, enable in
situ operations to drill multiple wells (sometimes more than
20) from a single location, further reducing surface
disturbance.

14. Steam Assisted Gravity
Drainage
• The majority of in situ operations use steam-assisted
gravity drainage, or SAGD. This method involves
pumping steam underground through a horizontal well to
liquefy the bitumen, which is then pumped to the surface
through a second recovery well.

16. Cyclic Steam Stimulation
• A second method – cyclic steam stimulation – pumps
steam down a vertical well to soak or liquefy the
bitumen, which is then pumped to the surface through
the same well. This technique is repeated until the oil is
removed.
• Unlike SAGD, this technique has the advantage of
requiring only a single production well.

18. Toe to Heel Air Injection
(THAI)
• This is an in situ combustion process that has shown to produce more
resource, while significantly limiting the environmental footprint. While it
uses some water for the intitial steaming, it is returned to the surface,
treated and returned to the environment.
• To begin the process, bitumen around the “toe” of the horizontal well is
heated with steam. Once this approximately three-month heating cycle
in a bitumen reservoir is complete, the steam is shut off and air is
injected into the vertical well to create a combustion reaction in the
reservoir.
• Through the controlled injection of air, a thick combustion front begins
to slowly move towards the “heel” of the horizontal well. As it heats up,
the bitumen drains into the horizontal production well and brought to the
surface through natural pressure.
• Because the combustion front heats the bitumen to 400 degrees, the oil
is also partially upgraded underground. The heat causes a portion of
the asphaltine content of the oil to be left behind as coke that is the fuel
for the continued combustion.

19. Zero Liquid Discharge
• ZLD has a number of benefits, such as recycling more than 90 per cent of the
facility’s water. This allows a company to recycle 90 per cent of injection
steam.
• As explained earlier, in SAGD, steam is injected in a well underground to heat
the bitumen, which flows into a second, producer well, and then up to the
surface.
• But in addition to bitumen, water with a high saline content also enters the
producer well as does condensed steam from the injection well. This is
usually disposed by pumping it into a disposal well underground. However,
ZLD treats the water to remove salts and recycles it to produce more injection
steam and leaves only solids to be disposed. This way, more than 90 per cent
of the injection steam required to an operation is recycled continuously and
very little water is drawn from underground aquifers.
• Expanding ZLD capacity has helped companies reach new production
records (barrels per day) while saving significant costs that would have been
spent on third-party wastewater disposal.

20.  The world's largest deposits of bitumen are in
(Alberta)Canada.
 Canada has abundant resources of bitumen and crude
oil, with an estimated remaining ultimate potential of 54
billion cubic metres (340 billion barrels).
 Tar sands do have one historic economic benefit: it is still
used as a road paving material.
 Since Canada will have more than enough energy to
meet its growing needs, the excess oil production from
its oil sands will probably go to export.
 The major importing country will probably continue to be
the United States, although there is increasing demand
for oil, particularly heavy oil, from growing in Asian
countries such as China and India.
Economics

21.  An oil price of $100/bbl is sufficient to promote active
growth in oil sands production.
 Major Canadian oil companies have announced
expansion plans and foreign companies are investing
significant amounts of capital, in many cases forming
partnerships with Canadian companies.
 Investment has been shifting towards in-situ steam
assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) projects and away
from mining and upgrading projects, as oil sands
operators foresee better opportunities from selling
bitumen and heavy oil directly to refineries than from
upgrading it to synthetic crude oil.
Costs and Production

22. Continue…..
 The Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI)
estimated that in 2012 the average plant gate costs
(including 10% profit margin) of primary recovery was
$30.32/bbl, of SAGD was $47.57/bbl, of mining and
upgrading was $99.02/bbl, and of mining without
upgrading was $68.30/bbl.
 A more likely scenario is that by 2035, Canadian oil
sands bitumen production will reach 800,000 m3/d (5.0
million barrels/day), 2.6 times the production for 2012.

23.  Oil sands extraction can
affect the land , water and
air.
 The land affect when the
bitumen is initially mined.
 The water resources by its
requirement for large
quantities of water during
separation of the oil and
sand.
 The air due to the release of
carbon dioxide and other
emissions.
Environmental Issues

24.  Wetlands can not be
reclaimed.
 Forest ecosystems are
too complex and poorly
understood to simply put
all the pieces back
together.
 Soil problems.
 Cost , time and
accountability.
Problems With Reclamation

26. Other Problems:-
 Leaking pipes can pollute ground water.
 Tailing ponds leak their toxins to surrounding areas and
ground water.
 when acidic compounds are released into the air these
substances can rise very high into the atmosphere,
where they mix and react with water, oxygen, and other
chemicals to form more acidic pollutants ,known as acid
rain.
 Increases Global warming.

27. Oil Shale

28. Introduction:-
• The term oil shale generally refers
to any sedimentary rock that
contains solid bituminous materials
that are released as petroleum like
liquids when the rock is heated in
the chemical process of Pyrolysis.
• Countries like Estonia ,China ,
Brazil and Germany have well
established oil shale industries.
• Oil shale reserves in India are
greater than 15 Billion Tons.
• Also known as “THE ROCK THAT
BURNS” .

29. Oil shale mining site in US

30. Composition:-
• General composition of oil shale constitutes inorganic
matrix, bitumen and kerogen.
• It does not have a definite geological definition nor a specific
chemical formula, and its seams do not always have discrete
boundaries.
• Oil shale contains a lower percentage of organic matter than
coal.
• In commercial grades of oil shale the ratio of organic matter
to mineral matter lies approximately between 0.75:5 and
1.5:5.
• The organic matter in oil shale has an atomic ratio of
hydrogen to carbon (H/C) approximately 1.2 to 1.8 times
lower than for crude oil and about 1.5 to 3 times higher than
for coals.

31. Oil shale extraction:-
• Oil shale can be mined using one of two
methods: underground mining using the room-and-pillar
method or surface mining.
• After mining, the oil shale is transported to a facility for
retorting, a heating process that separates the oil fractions of
oil shale from the mineral fraction.
• Retorting can be done above ground or underground. Also
called On-situ and In-situ respectively.

32. Conti...
• In-situ can potentially extract more oil from a given area of land than on-
situ processes, since they can access the material at greater depths than
surface mines can.
• In either case, the chemical process of pyrolysis converts the kerogen in the
oil shale to shale oil (synthetic crude oil), oil shale gas and spent shale.
Surface retort
Source: Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory

33. Oil shale reserves:-
• Oil shale is found in many places around the world with
more than 600 known deposits in more than 30 countries
on all continents. A 2005 estimate put the total world
resources of oil shale at 411 gigatonnes.
SOURCE: https://www.enefit.jo/en/oilshale/in-the-world
Largest oil shale resources :

34. Publishing Year - 2012

35. SOURCE: Petroleum geologist Jean Laherrere, from "Oil Shale
Review."

36. Oil shale economics:-
• The various attempts to develop oil shale deposits
have succeeded only when the cost of shale-oil
production in a given region comes in below the
price of crude oil or its other substitutes.
• According to a survey by RAND corporation, the
cost of producing a barrel of oil at a surface
retorting complex in the United States, would range
between US$70–95 . This estimate considers
varying levels of Kerogen quality and extraction
efficiency.
• In order to run a profitable operation, the price of
crude oil would need to remain above these levels.
• The US Department of Energy estimates that
the on-situ processing would be economic at
sustained average world oil prices above US$54
per barrel and in-situ processing would be
economic at prices above $35 per barrel.

37. Oil shale in India:-
• Oil Shale reserves in India are Greater than 15 Billion Tons.
• North-East India is endowed with rich deposits of coal.
• The coal is found in the Barail Formation of Tertiary age.
• Carbonaceous shale occurs interbedded with the coal. The presence
of coal and shale has been recorded in wells drilled for hydrocarbons
by ONGC and OIL.
• These formations outcrop on the surface towards the south of the oil
fields in a region called the Belt of Schuppen. Studies have indicated
that these coals and carbonaceous shale constitute the principal
source rocks that have generated the hydrocarbons produced from
the region.
• Potential locations
• Assam shelf
• Naga Schuppen Belt
• Assam-Arakkan Fold Belt

38. Barriers:-
• First, most of it needs to be dug out in strip mining rather that drilled
a process that has high environmental problems.
• Once dug out, it then needs to be heated to 450-500 Degree C,
enriched with hydrogen via steam before the resulting oil is
separated. The residue is a sludge that needs to be disposed of.
• The downsides of all this are that oil shale production create more
than four times as much greenhouse gases as conventional oil
production.
• The energy required to extract oil from oil shale is considerable, and
this could result in a low EROEI (energy returned on energy
invested) . Wastes something like 40% of its initial energy in
production.

39. Conti...
• Only when crude prices are high does oil shale
production make economic sense feasible. In theory, it
has the potential to make a minor contribution to the
Indian oil requirements, but it is not expected to be a
panacea to our oil-dependency.

40. Impact on environment :-
• Oil shale production is also considered to be quite harmful to the
environment.
• Both mining and processing of oil shale involve a variety
of environmental impact, such as global warming and greenhouse gas
emissions, disturbance of mined land, impacts on wildlife and air and
water quality.
• These include acid drainage induced by the sudden rapid exposure and
subsequent oxidation of formerly buried materials, the introduction of
metals including mercury into surface-water and groundwater, increased
erosion, sulfur-gas emissions, and air pollution caused by the production
of particulates during processing, transport, and support activities.
• In 2002, about 97% of air pollution, 86% of total waste and 23% of water
pollution in Estonia came from the power industry, which uses oil shale
as the main resource for its power production.
• It uses vast quantities of water (which are not always available where
the shale is).

41. Shale oil and gas production leads to
emission of most of the green house gases

42. Thank You