Feeling the heat over steam
Critics want a review of oilsands extraction process after Cold Lake leaks
COLD LAKE AIR WEAPONS RANGE — In a hard hat and overalls, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. president Steve Laut stands on a new boat launch on the edge of a marsh while behind him a fleet of watercraft are skimming an oily film off the water.
Noise cannons are booming, screeching recorded bird calls, plastic flags and decoys help keep wildlife away from this site where bitumen is leaking into the water on the company’s Primrose East oilsands project near Bonnyville. It’s an oddly colourful scene in the middle of muskeg and boreal forest, but the questions put to the Calgary executive this week on-site were serious.
About 80 per cent of Alberta’s oilsands will be extracted by in situ methods as opposed to open pit mines. In situ (using wells and pipelines) involves injecting steam into the ground to melt the bitumen, separate it from the sand and bring it to the surface.
Some say this method is more environmentally friendly than mines that carve up the earth. So in the boreal forest here, shiny pipelines stretch many kilometres through the forest at about waist height, partly to let wildlife pass underneath. One pipe takes the steam to the well, the other brings bitumen out for shipping.
But in the wake of CNRL leaks (the second since 2009), environmentalists and First Nations are raising some red flags about the steam-injection process. They fear it may be causing fissures in the rock that allow the bitumen to ooze to the surface in the swamp and threaten groundwater.
On the four sites, the leaks are now contained and the bitumen is vacuumed up daily or weekly.
Walter Janvier, a councillor with the Cold Lake First Nations, is worried because there’s no sign the leaks are slowing down, and no one knows for sure when it started or how to stop it.
While the company reported one leak site as early as May 20, the leaks probably started in late winter or early spring, possibly when workers on a seismic line noticed something. Laut acknowledged it will just take time for the underground pressure to subside and the leaks to stop.
Janvier says CNRL’s high pressure, cyclical steam stimulation method should undergo a serious technical review to see if it is still appropriate.
“We are concerned about this high pressure process, as some of those wells go half a kilometre down,” said Janvier, who is worried about aquifers deep underground. “It’s not so much the surface spill, that can be cleaned up. But when you can’t control what happens underground, that’s a different story. We want an investigation that looks at all the technical data.”
Janvier said he’s also concerned that the company only allowed First Nations to visit this week and they were only allowed on two of the four sites (the same two media were taken to visit on Thursday).
“There’s a reason for that and it’s because two other sites are more damaged,” said Janvier.
Janvier also pointed to a 2009 report by the provincial energy regulator that concluded there was no clear evidence to support the theory of faulty well bores in the 2009 leaks. The company should not be allowed to inject more steam until the cause is found, he added.
Laut is adamant that CNRL’s high pressure steam method is viable. It’s been used for 25 years with thousands of wells in the area with only a few incidents, he says. “We’re very confident, we’ve got a lot of data right now,” said Laut.
Laut said there are two layers of caprock, called Colorado shale, on top of the bitumen. The caprock cannot be cracked by the steam, but the upper layer has natural fractures.
If bitumen flows up an old well, it could reach the upper layer and then move sideways through a natural fissure, he says.
“It is physically impossible to inject steam through that caprock, we know that for certain,” said Laut. “But you could have a failure in the well bore” that would allow bitumen to seep to the surface.
“Once you get into the upper Colorado, occasionally (bitumen) will hit a natural fracture and present itself to surface.”
Laut said he does not disagree with the regulator’s report on 2009 that cited possible geological weakness in the area.
But the problem starts with a faulty well that allows bitumen to move up, not weak rock formation, he said, adding there are 8,000 in the Cold Lake area.
The company is now checking all well bores in the region and the cement casing around them, he said.
When it comes to describing the accident at the Canadian Natural Resources’ oilsands operation near Cold Lake, “leak” doesn’t do it justice. Neither does “spill.”
A “leak” can be plugged. A “spill” implies a one-time event.
What’s happening at CNRL’s project is neither. For the last three months, 7,300 barrels of bitumen have uncontrollably bubbled to the surface from deep underground and seeped into muskeg and water on four sites at the company’s operations, creating an ecological mess, killing wildlife and damaging the reputation of CNRL in particular and the oilsands industry in general.
The company has cut down trees, hauled away tonnes of oily muskeg and put containment booms on a contaminated lake. But the bitumen keeps coming, seeping out of the ground through long, narrow fissures. Not only has CNRL been unable to stop it, the company doesn’t know for sure why it keeps coming.
The Pembina Institute based in Calgary disturbingly describes the leak as an “uncontrolled blowout in an oil reservoir deep underground.”
On the surface, though, it is not a “geyser” as some environmental groups have dramatically described the flow. It would be more accurate to say the ground is suppurating bitumen or maybe festering. Or, if you insist on being dramatic, weeping.
But those descriptors don’t do justice to the size of the surface contamination. Enough bitumen has oozed out of the ground to half fill an Olympic swimming pool. Put another way, in volume it’s about onethird the size of the Enbridge accident that dumped more than 20,000 barrels of oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010, causing the largest inland pipeline spill in United States history and creating an $800-million cleanup job.
No matter the size or how you describe it, an oil spill is not a pretty sight — not that it’s been easy to take a peek at the CNRL accident. The affected area is not only remote, it is on the Cold Lake Air Weapons range which means it is out of bounds to civilians. Its inaccessibility has made the story more intriguing to journalists in Canada but around the world.
On Thursday, company and military officials took a gaggle of local, national and international reporters to the site to see for themselves. My colleague Sheila Pratt was among them and reported that 200 workers are urgently trying to clean up the mess and prevent migrating birds from landing on a small lake in the contaminated area: “In an effort to scare off birds, noise cannons are booming, flags flutter on the site, decoys of predators dot the lake and bizarre mannequins peek out of trees,” wrote Pratt. “On the lake, large booms contain the surface oil while crews collect bitumen.”
We don’t know how much all this will cost CNRL, not the least because we don’t know how long it will continue.
The problem seems to be related to the company’s in situ process for recovering bitumen. In what’s called “highpressure cyclic steam stimulation,” CNRL injects steam into deep wells to melt the bitumen. After weeks of injection the process is reversed and bitumen is pumped to the surface. CNRL officials think the leak was caused by an old well bore that couldn’t withstand the massive underground pressure and they say the problem should improve as the underground pressure decreases.
However, the province’s governmental watchdog, the Alberta Energy Regulator, says it’s too early to reach any conclusions about the cause. As a precaution, the regulator has ordered the company to stop steaming in the affected area. There remains the possibility the problem was the result of a crack in the overlying cap rock created by the high-pressure steaming process. That would be a much larger problem for CNRL. It’s one thing for the company to plug up an old cracked well bore but quite another to deal with cracks in a geological formation.
It would also be a much larger problem for the oilsands industry that is moving away from open pit mining to in situ methods designed to be less environmentally disruptive. The CNRL incident is raising troubling questions and providing ammunition for environmental groups to once again attack the industry.
Also troubling is the fact this is the second CNRL leak in the same area. In 2009, 5,600 barrels seeped into the environment. The cause was never conclusively determined but the provincial regulator said “geological weakness in combination with stress induced by high pressure steam injection” may have contributed to the incident.
Greenpeace spokesman Mike Hudema says regulators need to review the in situ methods: “How do we identify what formations are safe to take highpressure steam?”
Given that the industry plans to recover 80 per cent of the oilsands through the in situ process, CNRL and regulators must come up with some answers. The first and most obvious is question is what happened at the company’s operations near Cold Lake?
It doesn’t matter if you call it a leak or a spill or an underground blowout — we need to know what caused it and what it means to the integrity of the oilsands industry.