Sticky fix

Barry Rosengrant, founder of Californiabased Petromax Technologies, explains what his company can do with its patented Petromax hydrocarbon technology in simple terms. “We’re sand cleaners,”he states. “We get clean sand.” It’s an innovative way of looking at the job of producing bitumen, but it’s also an accurate description of what this technology, which could save industry untold dollars, does.

In a matter of minutes, Rosengrant says the technology turns a barrel of oil sand into a tidy stratification with sand at the bottom, water-based Petromax solution in the middle, and, floating serenely at the top, bitumen.

The question is: does anybody care?

In spite of successful demonstrations that seem to wow spectators and around three years of talking to industry, the Petromax technology has had a hard time getting off, or rather into, the ground. A well-publicized plan with the now-defunct Wentworth Oil Sands to begin testing in Utah’s bitumen deposits held promise, but the deal fell through. Confidentiality restrictions prevent any of the parties from saying why.

While the company has talked to many interested parties about taking the technology to the next level, the process is frustratingly slow for people who have seen how well–and quickly–Petromax works.

Geoff Dolbear, chief operating scientist at Petromax Technologies, understands industry’s reluctance to whole-heartedly embrace the idea that the technology will work. A chemist, Dolbear has more than 35 years of experience in the petroleum industry, including work in the field of catalytic hydroprocessing of bitumen and heavy oils. “There are a lot of charlatans in the field with all kinds of wonderful things that use ultrasound and microwaves and other buzzwords,” he says. “People put money into it, and it disappears.”

Dolbear has also worked in R&D laboratories of major companies in other industries, and knows how difficult it is for someone from outside industry to come in with a good idea. “There is a great tendency on the part of big company R&D labs to think that anything that’s brought in from the outside can’t be any good,”he explains. “It’s a tendency of technical people everywhere.”

And you can’t get much further outside the oil sands industry than Rosengrant, who never intended to develop the next great oil sands technology. President of a consulting company that takes an inside-out approach to finding new facilities for corporations–a company he still owns–Rosengrant had a client that did non-destructive testing in the refineries of southern California during shutdowns. His intimate consulting style resulted in an in-depth knowledge of his client’s operations. Before he knew it, he’d also discovered quite a bit about the refinery business.

One problem kept cropping up in conversation: the sticky sludge coating the bottom of crude oil storage tanks.

“If they don’t periodically pull that sludge out and inspect the bottom, production companies and refineries run the real risk of having the tank bottom eaten through by the acids contained in the sludge,” Rosengrant says. But the cleaning methods being used were old, ineffective, and expensive. In addition, the toxic sludge had to be transported for proper disposal, an extra cost for refineries.

When Rosengrant sat on the board of a biotech company that employed Miroslav Colic as chief scientist, the two got talking. “I said, ‘Miro, there’s this problem in refineries that nobody has done anything about for 20 years’.” Colic, a physical chemist, disappeared into his lab, emerging several weeks later with something he thought might work.

He was right. The technology that Colic developed reduces the viscosity of the sludge so it is easy to pump. The sticky sludge no longer sticks to the bottom of the tank or to anything else; instead, it becomes a pumpable slurry. The slurry can then be taken to the coker and turned into a saleable product, quenching the coke in the last phase of production. Refineries can save costs on transporting sludge for disposal and, because the fluidized sludge doesn’t stick to the holding tank but instead stays in suspension, it’s ready to be used whenever it’s needed.

What exactly is going on to cause such a reaction? “The science behind what we’re doing is pretty old stuff,” says Dolbear. It’s called the zeta potential, and has to do with the ionic charge on the surface of materials. By manipulating the zeta potential on the solids in the sludge through a physical and chemical process, Colic was able to cause particles that normally attract to repel one another. Dolbear explains it this way:”The usual approach is to, if you will, pull the oil away from the dirt. This [technology] makes the surface of the dirt repel the oil. You are actually freeing the oil because it doesn’t want to stick to the dirt anymore.”

Further tests were done to refine the tank-cleaning technology. “We knew that if we overdid it by putting a little too much pressure or a little higher concentration, we’d have a problem,” Rosengrant says, explaining that the result would be a complete separation of the sand from the colloidal suspension within the tank. “Then we’d have to go in the tank and get the sand out.”

But wait. In northern Alberta there were tons of people who wanted to get the sand– and the bitumen–out. It took three years of hard work, but Petromax eventually managed to get five gallons of oil sand from a person both Rosengrant and Dolbear refer to as “a friend from the University of Alberta.”

They immediately set to work to see if they could clean the sand–and produce bitumen. “Within minutes, we had clean, white sand, so white that when you put it on a sheet of paper you can’t see it,” says Rosengrant. “There was no hydrocarbon stuck to the sand.”

Instead, the hydrocarbon was floating on top of a layer of water, ready for recovery.

Excited, Rosengrant called his friend at the U of A. But the friend was more interested in how Petromax worked on another sample he had sent along with the five gallons of oil sand: five gallons of mature fine tailings (MFT). Did the technology work on the toxic tailings? “I said, ‘Well, we’re working on it,’ which was a lie,” says Rosengrant. The MFT terrified Rosengrant and his colleagues; the stuff brought tears to their eyes when they opened the container. All they wanted to do was find a safe way to dispose of it.

Then Petromax Technologies’ chief operating officer Randy Brawn got interested in the possibility of breaking the tailings emulsion. Although not a scientist, Brawn had been intimately involved in the testing of the technology up to that point, and started working on the MFT on his own time.

According to Rosengrant, the call announcing success came from Brawn around midnight. “He said, ‘I think I’ve broken the emulsion.’ I said, ‘You’ve been sniffing that stuff! Go to bed’.” But Brawn had done it. The MFT separated into fine clay at the bottom, a black layer above–believed to contain heavy metals that could be recovered and sold–the Petromax/water solution in a third layer, and, on top, bitumen. “There’s still about 10% of bitumen in that MFT,”says Rosengrant. “There’s enough bitumen and other components in the MFT to almost pay for cleaning it up.”

Experiments were replicated in the labs of Dr. Teh Fu Yen at the University of Southern California. The resulting report was sent to the U of A, and ideas for ridding Alberta of its tailings ponds began to take shape. One idea was to float barges across tailings ponds, devouring the emulsion with the technology from the top down.

Currently, no further research is being done on the viability of Petromax in tailings ponds, and Petromax Technologies isn’t actively pursuing the possibility of using the technology for that purpose. Instead, Rosengrant and Dolbear have turned their attention to using the technology for in situ bitumen production.

Using the technology underground wit
hout heat results in a 95% yield of bitumen, according to Rosengrant. “We wash the sand and we leave it behind,” he explains. “People say, ‘We’re going to wash a trillion barrels of sand?’Well, I’ve got news for you. It is far more environmentally sensitive and cost-effective to process the sand in place than to pipeline it to billion-dollar plants.”

The in situ process, which uses a vertical well rather than the horizontal set-up used in steam-assisted gravity drainage, is currently being patented. Rosengrant guesses that once the technology is proven in a pilot project, setting up to use it would greatly reduce the capital costs of oil sands development.

Much work remains to be done before the Petromax process becomes commercially viable. “Enough work has to be done in the lab to define the parameters for a pilot plant,” says Dolbear. “On the other hand, this isn’t something that somebody needs to go in and do a 10-year R&D program on.”

Tricia Radison is a Calgary-based freelance writer who writes extensively about the oil sands industry.

---