GlassPoint’s Solar EOR technology could burn its way through the region as owners look to maximize production of heavy oil.
Thermal Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) has proven itself to be an effective technique to facilitate the recovery of heavy oil that is otherwise too thick to pump to the surface through conventional means.
High-pressure steam is shot underground in order to increase the temperature of oil reserves and change reservoir consistency, allowing for easier production. The steam for thermal EOR plants is traditionally generated by burning large amounts of natural gas.
With the search for oil growing more heated, countries and companies are looking for new ways to produce oil from more difficult reserves. Within the Middle East, the drive to improve EOR technology has been most aggressive in Oman. With its smaller, heavy-oil reserves; and limited access to gas, Oman has become a fertile ground for EOR projects to take root.
“I think EOR is a very important part of the oil future. The Fuel/Gas crisis is going to persist and that creates a perfect storm for us,” says Rod MacGregor, president and CEO of GlassPoint. “It’s an environment where you have heavy-oil production which needs steam, an environment where there’s shale gas, but there’s fantastic sunshine, you couldn’t make that up, it’s perfect.”
The revolutionary company has been making the headlines in recent weeks and it’s no surprise why. The company recently closed a $26 million second round of financing to include Royal Dutch Shell alongside other leading energy investors, RockPort Capital, Nth Power and Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital.
GlassPoint forged a name for itself early last year when it unveiled the world’s first commercial solar EOR project at Berry Petroleum’s 21Z lease in Kern County, California.
The company generates steam by using mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto pipes that contain water. The system is housed in a glass structure that protects the mirrors and equipment from the environment, allowing for easier maintenance.
The GlassPoint steam generators produce more than 14 tonnes of steam per acre per day, the highest steam production per unit area in the industry, according to the company’s website. Steam needs to be transported from the generation facility to the oil field.
The GlassPoint system has a higher energy density than many older systems which helps to reduce steam transportation costs.
“Technically, you can send steam along a couple of kilometres, a big steam field is not unusual with long steam lines, economically, the shorter you can make them the better, that’s one of the things we are trying to do with field design, to optimize that and keep the steam line short,” says MacGregor.
At the same time, the glass housing protects the mirrors and related equipment from sand and wind.
The glasshouse’s roof can be cleaned by robots working capable of washing eight acres in a single night with water captured in gutters, filtered and re-used in order to minimize water consumption.
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Building a protective shell also helps to cut down transportation costs because mirrors can be lighter and require less steel and concrete reinforcements. The complete GlassPoint solar field, including the glasshouse enclosure, weighs less than 5 Kg per square meter of mirror surface, whereas a solar field composed of outdoor troughs typically weighs more than 30 Kg per square meter of mirror.
The glasshouse protection also allows the mirrors to be more accurate, in turn the increased mirror accuracy allows the company to use a smaller receiver tube, which results in a higher concentration ratio and improved thermal efficiency. “We produce 5 times as much steam per unit of land as the competing solar systems,” says MacGregor.
All of these factors allow the GlassPoint system to do one very simple thing: use less gas. The GlassPoint system can be integrated into an existing facility in at least two different ways.
The Constant Rate Steaming strategy where solar steam is produced during the day and gas is burned at night. The two generators run with the same feed-water and produce the same temperature, pressure and quality of steam.
Automatic control systems vary the firing-rate of the fuel-fired steam generator to maintain a constant rate of steam injection both day and night. Most fuel-fired steam generators have a minimum firing rate of around 30%, which means that during daytime solar can provide at most 70% of the steam required.
At night when there is no solar steam the fuel-fired steam generators provide 100% of the steam required. The net result is that solar can reduce fuel consumption by around 25% on an annual basis.
The Variable Rate Steaming strategy increases the amount of steam injected during the day, and decreases the amount injected at night, allowing solar steam to provide a larger percentage to the steam injected overall.
The fuel-powered generators operate at a base-rate both day and night; the solar steam is added during the day.
According to a report published by SPE International, the impact of daily cycles in solar-
generated steam on oil recovery can be ignored, oil production will essentially be unaffected by variable rate steam injection systems because production from the huge thermal mass of the oil formation depends on the total amount of steam injected, not the hours in which it is injected.
The maximum reduction in gas use depends on the exact characteristics of the reservoir, but in most cases fuel consumption can be reduced by as much as 80%.
Integrating into an existing infrastructure is absolutely key to the success of any EOR system. The company uses the same equipment that has been used for decades in gas-fired steam generators, including the boiler tubes, sensors, pumps and controls.
For decades, heavy oilfields around the world have used Once Through Steam Generators (OTSG). In an OTSG oilfield, produced water that has been minimal treated and softened is fed to the boiler and converted directly to steam for well injection.
The GlassPoint solar steam generator is designed to operate on the same feedwater as an OTSG. This helps to reduce water treatment costs when compared with older solar designs that require demineralized water to operate reliably.
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It’s a very exciting time for us, I think it’s become increasingly clear that EOR is going to be the future of oil production in the region, with Kuwait and Bahrain getting on the bandwagon,” says MacGregor.
The success of the second round of financing definitely has MacGregor feeling good. “It was exactly what we wanted to raise; it went very smoothly, partly because of the longstanding relationships we have with a lot of these entities,” he admits.
The $26 million couldn’t come at a more critical time either. “It’s a very stark contrast with what’s happening to the market as a whole, as you know solar companies are dropping like flies right now.
A lot of companies are going ball and ceiling to get financed and even declaring bankruptcy, so I think we’ve been validated not just by who backed us, but by the very existence of the round itself,” says MacGregor.
The funding will help the company expand its presence, particularly in the Middle East. It is currently building a power petrol office in Muscat and increasing its staff.
“We’re doing more projects in the region, so the finance is all going towards that, it’s not about any particular project, it’s going towards the parent company,” he says.
MacGregor is convinced that GlassPoint is growing at precisely the right time and in the right place. Oman has become an EOR leader because it has to be, suggests MacGregor.
The country’s light oil production ran out in the late 2000, “so they’ve been continuing oil production by doing more EOR, and that’s going to happen to everyone at one point; Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, even Saudi at some point.”
“Oman is probably 10-15 years ahead of everyone else, they’ve been doing this a long time and other people are just starting to do the same thing,” says MacGregor.
