Divers pressures ranging to hundreds of kPa to more than 2 MPa. Temperature approaching 250°C. Five hundred meters underground. A complex flow of solids, liquids and gases. That’s the environment at the intake of an electric submersible pump raising a slurry of bitumen, methane, alkane solvent, water, sand and steam from in situ oil sands operations in northern Alberta.
Electric submersible pumps (ESPs) are the workhorses of in situ operations in the Canadian Oil Sands. These narrow, roughly 14-meter tubes contain position sensors, an electric motor, and diffusers & impellers that pull the bitumen slurry out of the production well and up to the surface all day every day.
Due to the challenging operational environment, demanding production schedule, and the physics of the slurry itself, ESPs can seize up and fail, causing significant production delays. The industry replaces roughly 1,000 ESPs annually, in addition to many more that require intensive maintenance and repairs.
Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) became the innovation arm of Pathways Alliance in 2022, and is focused on collaborative action and innovation in oil sands environmental technology. Representing 95% of oil sands production, Pathways Alliance is made up of the six largest oil sands producers in Canada.
COSIA Challenges are one way we articulate an actionable innovation need, bringing global innovation capacity to bear on environmental challenges and opportunities in Canada’s oil sands. COSIA is looking for ways to improve the efficiency of operations by identifying innovative technologies to enhance or even replace existing ESPs. Through the Oil Sands Artificial Lift Challenge, we encourage respondents from around the globe to propose technologies that could achieve improvements in capacity, efficiency, and reliability.
Artificial lift involves using chemical and engineering techniques to help extract subsurface materials. For the in situ oil sands projects operated by members of the Pathways Alliance, steam is introduced via an injection well, raising the temperature of the molasses-like bitumen, warming it and allowing it to flow down to the production well. Additionally, a non-compressible gas (NCG), often methane, is also introduced via the injection well. NCG supports pressure maintenance and reduces the need for energy-intensive steam, resulting in improved process energy efficiency. As the bitumen trickles down to the production well, it brings with it quantities of water and NCG as well as particulates like rock and sand. Inside the production well, the ESP begins the process of pumping that mixture to the surface. As wells mature, the NCG injection volumes also increase, leading to high Gas-Volume-Fraction (GVF) flows that pose significant challenges to the industry’s conventional artificial lift systems.
Through the Oil Sands Artificial Lift Challenge, the Pathways Alliance wants to discover new collaboration partners with innovative technologies that are better able to handle that
multi-phase and multi-component slurry without seizing up, reducing operational costs and downtime as well as improving well efficiency.