Trying to please all and satisfying none

[By our guest columnist, ‘Thiophilos’]

PennWell’s third annual Oil Sands and Heavy Oils Technology (OSHOT) conference showed up on schedule in Calgary in July, in the midst of more media madness on the topic of the environmental impact resulting from society’s continuing love affair with energy from converting the energy which Mother Nature (over many millions of years) put in the carbon-hydrogen bond into the energy needed to drive its ever more luxurious life style – for some.
It is hardly surprising that the sulphur recovered from the world’s second largest hydrocarbon reserve - in Alberta - (notwithstanding Colonel Hugo’s recent claims for Orinoco) was again featured in a whole day session on the yellow element. It is recovered during the upgrading and refining of a present 1.5 million bbl/d of daily oil sands bitumen production that is predicted to reach 3.5 million bbl/d by 2025. At a near 5% sulphur content this could mean over 9 million t/a of the yellow element from Alberta’s oil sand production alone. And all of this in the face of rising world wide production from sourer conventional hydrocarbon production and possible competition for its use in fertilizer manufacture. All of these factors popped up somewhere, somehow in the presentations and active and full discussion session that followed.
If there was one message that emerged from the day long dialogue on dirty sulphur from dirty oilsand it was the harder sulphur tries the more bad press it attracts. We try to please all and end up satisfying none. With sea floor oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, and US congressmen calling for Americans (the world’s most extravagant users of the stuff) to strike Alberta off its “to visit” list until the oil sands production (which goes mostly to them!!) is stopped, it is indeed a hard task to respond responsibly to the demands for less emissions and more production. But, notwithstanding the mood of the media and by extension the people their readers, the industry keeps on trying, regretfully without too much public relations success.
The rigor of regulation, and the resulting hoops that must be jumped through in the process of design and operation of facilities to handle the recovered sulphur, was reviewed and commented on by Rob Mann of Alberta Sulphur Terminals (Hazco). The harder you try, the longer it takes, and it is not for the faint of heart was the message. While doing all of this handling, storage and transportation, Glenn Weagle of IPAC Chemicals of Vancouver (where millions of tons of the stuff gets stored and handled), detailed just how complex a challenge reducing the environmental impact of fugitive sulphur fines can be. The stuff even volatilises from the surface of the stockpile when the sun shines on it. Tariq Cheema of Syncrude and Paul Davis of Alberta Sulphur Research Ltd. reported on recent very detailed studies of just how unsold and stockpiled elemental sulphur behaves as it sits waiting for end users to show up and haul it away. How does it shrink, crack and fail structurally? Does it acidify, and how fast under what conditions? How important is aerobic oxygen access and what role does moisture play? What role does percolation play and can cover affect this? Does burial help and what are the results of real life, full-sized tests of surface and buried block storage? And what about the hydrogen sulphide that it can evolve in storage, asked Mike Shields of ASRL, when it wasn’t “de-gassed” up front? Who said sulphur was just another bulk solid product to handle? That attitude is probably one of the main reasons for its current bad reputation.
The solution to much of the foregoing challenge is to find new markets for the old yellow element. It is not that the ideas and even the basic R&D has not been done; Shell Canada’s extensive and ongoing work on their Thiopave formulation for roadway surfacing was described by Timo Makinen. Gerry D’Aquin of Con-Sul reviewed and commented on some earlier ASRL work on a very convenient local use of both oil sands tailings and elemental sulphur for temporary mine site paving: An environmentally beneficial improvement to mining operations and an opportunity to save on haulage truck fuel costs due to reduction in frictional drag losses in the wet/mud seasons.
The essence of a good, productive day-long session on a focused topic is the discussion that it generates. Larry Marks, previously of Shell, joined Jim Hyne, Paul Davis and Gerry D’Aquin as the “provocateurs” in an hour long discussion of both the ideas from the papers and additional matters relevant to the future of recovered elemental sulphur. It was perhaps a pity that the audience did not include many of those in the Heavy Oil Patch that produce the stuff in the first place so that they can make money from the ‘in demand’ desulphurised fuel. We continue to try, but the way is long and the hill is steep!
'Thiophilos'