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Finding new and unconventional resources
With easy oil (easy to reach and recover) unlikely to supply our growing energy needs, keeping up with demand is becoming more difficult. However, around three trillion barrels of so-called unconventional oil exists, but is trapped as oil shales, oil sands or very heavy oil. Likewise, around one-third of the world's gas fields are highly contaminated, which make them difficult to use. But as the world's energy needs rise, so does the ingenuity of the scientists and engineers who develop and implement the new techniques and technologies for accessing these vast, but difficult, resources.
Canada’s oil sands are one of the unconventional sources that Shell is now developing thanks to advances in technology. The Athabasca Oil Sands Project already provides more than 10% of Canada’s oil needs and there are plans to increase production to more than 500,000 barrels a day.
Oil sands are a blend of clay, sand, water and bitumen – a very thick oil. Unlike conventional oil recovery techniques that require drilling underground, in oil sands mining, the ore is excavated using shovels and trucks. The material is then mixed with warm water to separate the oil from the sand. The bitumen rises to the surface and the resulting mixture, called froth, is treated to remove the remaining sand and fine clay, producing clean, dry bitumen that is diluted and transported for further processing.
Shell recently developed a new froth treatment technology called Shell Enhance, the first commercial application of an innovative technology that will reduce costs and improve energy efficiency in oil sands production. By using higher temperatures, Shell Enhance froth treatment technology can more efficiently remove impurities from the oil sands froth because it uses less energy, less water, and fewer vessels for cooling and reheating. By saving energy, about 40,000 tonnes per year of greenhouse gas emissions are prevented.
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Developing new processing technologies for difficult crudes (PDF, 66 KB) - opens in new window
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Contaminated gas – Technology for turning sour to sweet
About one-third of the world’s gas fields contain sour gas, mostly contaminated by hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide but also by carbonyl sulphide, mercaptans and organic sulphides and disulphides. The sulphur compounds makes sour gas highly poisonous, and cause iron to corrode and equipment such as valves and flow lines to malfunction. But as the fields with low levels of contaminants are becoming depleted, the industry has had to exploit formations of sour gas and apply increasingly effective technologies to remove the contaminants. The result is sweet gas, profitably extracted and processed to meet increasingly stringent environmental specifications.
Shell Global Solutions has developed innovative gas-treating technologies with both up- and downstream applications. The first is at the wellhead to provide cleaner, higher quality gas for transporting to gas plants. The second is at these gas plants where additional technology is used to process the gas components further to obtain valuable products and meet high environmental standards. We have developed different technologies for various conditions and contaminant types. We provide design, technical services and R&D support, and our technology is currently applied in more that 1,000 Shell and non-Shell sites.
Meeting the increasingly tight specifications is a major part of the business requirement in the extraction and processing of sour gas. We developed the ADIP‡ process to extract hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide from gas streams. It can also be applied to removing hydrogen sulphide and carbonyl sulphide from liquefied petroleum gas or natural gas liquids.
The Sulfinol‡ process removes the same compounds from the gas as ADIP, but also organic compounds. It is used when the gas contains higher than usual levels of organic contaminants.
The acid hydrogen-sulphide-containing gas from an ADIP or Sulfinol unit can then be sent to a Claus unit in which about 95% of the hydrogen sulphide is converted into elemental sulphur (the remaining 5% is released to atmosphere as sulphur dioxide). By putting a SCOT‡ unit behind the Claus unit, the sulphur recovery efficiency can be enhanced to levels over 99.8%.
In addition, we have also developed corrosion-management software and risk-optimised asset-inspection techniques to help facilities contend with the corrosion issues that contaminated gas may bring.
‡ADIP, SCOT and Sulfinol are Shell trademarks.
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High performance gas treating portfolio (PDF, 217 KB) - opens in new window