Razor Energy eyes geothermal as source of electricity
TRAINING DAY The High Level Bridge Street Car makes a crossing Monday.
A Calgary-based oil and gas company operating in Swan Hills could be among the first in Canada to use geothermal heat as a source of power.
Razor Energy is working to capture heat from hot water reservoirs on its site to turn into electricity. The company has teamed up with the University of Alberta’s department of earth and atmospheric sciences to research this new method.
Jonathan Banks, project lead with the university, said oilfield activity produces a lot of hot water by bringing geothermal energy to the surface through day-to-day operations.
“This has never been done anywhere at this scale,” Banks said.
Razor president Doug Bailey said if the company succeeds, the project will be economically viable and worthy of commercial investment.
“We’re very happy to see others getting into this industry, which we believe has a very strong and significant future but for us, we’re going to do right by our stakeholders,” he said. “If we don’t win the race, so to speak, so be it. It would be great if we were first but we’re not going to force that issue.”
Historically, geothermal energy has been limited to volcanic landscapes, but Banks said the geothermal community is looking to expand into new areas that previously weren’t seen as economically viable. He said the university plans to use the research to see if the same thing can be applied to other companies across the province.
“We’re looking at what works and what doesn’t work in their field, and then trying to extrapolate that across the entire province to see what the provincial opportunities are with this type of technology,” he said. “Hydrocarbon producers are starting to take their carbon footprint seriously.”
The project is currently being constructed and is in the middle of final engineering. The project is designed to generate 21 megawatts of power from two sources. Around five megawatts will be produced from hot water heat and heat recovered from the battery site and an additional 15 will be from natural gas-fired generation.
Razor has received $7 million from the federal and provincial governments to fund the approximately $15 to $20 million project.
The timeline for the project includes a heat pilot in the summer, possible civil construction in the third quarter and potentially connecting to Alberta’s grid in the first quarter of 2020.