A Texas company with a patented crop-based crude oil recovery technology is contemplating building a production plant in Western Canada.
“We’re considering it as the business increases, so it’s possible because there is a lot of oil out there,” said Paul Berger, vice-president of Oil Chem Technologies.
The company produces surfactants that help oil companies recover more oil from their wells than they can using conventional techniques. It is increasingly making these surfactants out of crops that contain very long chain fatty acids (VLCFA).
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Oil companies typically extract one-third of the oil in a deposit and then move on to another location. Another one-third can be recovered using Oil Chem’s surfactants.
“(That is ) as much oil as has been taken out in the whole history of the world,” said Berger, who earlier in his career helped develop Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.
Oil Chem’s surfactants are super strong detergents with 10,000 times the cleaning power of household detergents.
The product is incorporated into injection water at the wells, where it then scours hard-to-get oil out of the rock.
“The oil is not down in the ground as a big pool of oil. It’s actually in the solid rock. If you hold it in your hand, you couldn’t see the oil. It’s very, very non-porous,” said Berger.
“You need something to be able to penetrate into that rock and displace the oil.”
The company uses its Enhanced Oil Recovery technology to recover 60 barrels of oil for every barrel of energy expended, which is a better return than what is seen in ethanol and biodiesel production.
Oil Chem is involved in 25 oil recovery projects, which have used more than 27 million kilograms of its surfactants.
The surfactants were initially petroleum based but the company is now producing agricultural-based products that offer certain fatty acids that don’t exist in petroleum and are difficult to synthesize.
Oil companies are demanding that the products they use to scour the rocks are renewable solutions that don’t contaminate aquifers. They are also pushing for products derived from non-food crops.
That is why Oil Chem is particularly interested in the work that the Plant Biotechnology Institute is doing in Saskatoon with Brassica carinata, or Ethiopian mustard.
Scientists have genetically modified the crop to enhance the amount of erucic and nervonic acid in the oil. They are two of the VLCFAs that have interested Oil Chem and other potential industrial customers.
David Taylor, a senior PBI research scientist working on the project, said they have been able to boost the amount of erucic acid in the oil to 60 percent from 35 percent and the amount of nervonic acid to 45 percent from two percent.
The high erucic lines of Ethiopian mustard are more advanced than the high nervonic lines, which are in greater demand.
Taylor is thrilled with Oil Chem’s interest in the crop and in building a processing plant in Western Canada.
“That’s one of the best fits we’ve seen (for Ethiopian mustard),” he said.
“It’s excellent to see a forward pull from the market on something we’re producing, which validates the reason we started this in the first place.”
He anticipates farmers could potentially be growing the non-food crop in the arid brown soil zone region of the Prairies in three to five years if all goes well with the regulatory process.
Berger didn’t know what size of a production facility the company would potentially build, but it would probably produce nine to 45 million kilograms of erucic acid annually.
It would likely be located in south-e rn Saskatchewan or southern Alberta, where the company would have access to the crop as well as chemical ingredients that would have to be imported from the United States.
Berger said the company operates a plant in Asia that uses 600 tonnes of erucic acid a month and is building another one in southeast Asia that will use 1,000 tonnes per month, or 11 million kilograms per year.
Taylor said a similar-sized plant in Western Canada would require production of 74,000 to 123,000 acres of Ethiopian mustard.
Berger said the company is working on recovery projects in Canada where it must import erucic acid from India, which isn’t cost effective.
Some major oil industry customers have asked the company to consider building a Canadian production plant.
“We do have quite a few projects now going on in Canada, but the magnitudes are not enough to support a plant,” he said.
It would become prudent to build a plant to save on shipping once some of those projects scaled up from the pilot stage to the “big field” size.
For instance, Oil Chem is working with a customer in Fort McMurray, Alta., on a way to get oil out of the oil-sands without steam and heat.
“If that ever goes, it could be very, very large,” he said.
