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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Taikun who wrote (48629)	9/7/2005 11:09:00 PM
From: Sweet Ol	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206184

I don't know, but I am guessing that Alberta has a lot of salt water deep in the ground. Usually it can't be used for water flooding oil and probably not for oil shale because of the mineral content. They also may be looking for a way to clean up the water from CBM wells. A good desalination process would probably work for a lot of bad water. BWDIK! Best, JRH

To: Taikun who wrote (48629)	9/8/2005 12:28:04 AM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206184

The THAI process uses injected air to drive oil deposits up from the tar sand rather than using steam. The advantage to using this extraction process is you don't need water and you need far less energy, as you're not heating the steam. The disadvantage to this process is you're not heating the tar sand, so the percentage of petroleum extracted from the tar sand is smaller. In this way, THAI is very similar to Shell's in-situ extraction for shale oil. Both use a low-cost process to extract only the lighter fraction of the petroleum deposit, leaving most of the petroleum deposit in the ground. So you are cream skimming, collecting a more valuable product for less cost - at the expense of leaving most of the petroleum behind. In this way you can make a large uneconomic project into a much smaller but profitable project. This makes later extraction more difficult, more expensive, and in some cases not even possible if the deposit is no longer porous to any liquid. And yes, its quite obvious why desalination equipment is needed in Alberta. They need a lot of water. You can use natural gas as the hydrogen donor, but this is very expensive. Natural gas is worth more as natural gas. .

To: Taikun who wrote (48629)	9/8/2005 8:43:02 PM
From: schrodingers_cat	Respond to of 206184

>On a side note, do you think THAI could work? It seems that THAI is based on computer modeling and maybe some laboratory scale experiments. But as the backers themselves admit: "Scale-up of THAI, from laboratory to a field scale, is very complex. In fact, previously, there has not been any satisfactory 3D simulation of conventional in situ combustion." In fact the whole process looks to be exceedingly complex to model. There are guaranteed to be quite a few surprises when they try this for real. I doubt it will work the first time and even if it eventually succeeds it is likely to require years of trial and error. Reading the Bath Uni. pages I can't help feeling that it all sounds too good to be true.