It may not convince environmentalists, but researchers are developing a cleaner route to extract energy from hydrocarbons trapped below the Arctic ice, reports Elisabeth Jeffries
When Shell dropped plans to drill wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in the Arctic in summer 2012, it was following the orders of the regulator. The company was required to have a containment dome to catch oil that could leak onto the seabed if a there was a spill. But just as the dome was undergoing final tests, it was damaged, which meant cancelling plans to drill five Arctic wells in 2012. The incident was an expensive setback for the company. But what if it could explore and drill in a cleaner and unobtrusive way? Environmentalists would no doubt ridicule this idea, but it is taken seriously by some geologists and petrochemical engineers. Al Fraser, geology professor at Imperial College, London University, UK, contends cleaner, more efficient technology can be developed, helping not only to protect the Arctic region but also giving Western companies a competitive edge over Russia. The Russians, states Fraser, do not have the right skills to explore
and drill successfully in Arctic regions. ‘They want to use a nuclear drilling machine to operate under the ice. We don’t want them to develop that or let them loose with inadequate technologies. At least Western companies are in there bringing the right technologies to bear,’ he says. It follows that less intrusive technology could open the door to an Arctic future and provide a degree of public acceptability. That, at least, is the thinking behind a new project at Imperial College. The university is developing a store of new technologies that may help Arctic oil hunters operate more effectively in sub-zero temperatures. Among the ideas explored by the university’s new multidisciplinary Arctic research cluster, due to start up in 2013, with funding from oil and gas companies, is a technique known as down-hole processing. Fraser and colleagues at Imperial’s
Energy Futures Lab have dedicated more than two years of initial study to down-hole processing, a gasification
Oil spill response crews practice laying out nearly 600m of a floating curtain-like device designed to contain oil from the Nanuq response vessel near Valdez, Alaska, US
technique that involves processing hydrocarbons underground rather than above the surface of the Earth. They aim to develop a reactor model for the gasification of hydrocarbons in order to produce hydrogen and synthesis gas (CO and H2
) combined
with upgraded hydrocarbons for different energy and petrochemical applications. This underground conversion of
the surface. Our long term aim is
hydrocarbons could potentially offer an alternative route towards clean production of hydrogen. Growing fuel cell markets, they argue, will drive a greater demand for synthesis gas and hydrogen, which are produced at the moment by steam reforming and partial oxidation of hydrocarbons. ‘At the moment, we take oil and gas deep in the subsurface and don’t make use of the energy associated with extracting it at high temperatures. Instead, we lift [oil] to the surface and put more energy in to converting it to fuel, increasing the carbon dioxide (CO2
the hydrogen and methane to the surface,’ explains Geoff Maitland, the energy engineer heading the Imperial College down-hole processing research project.
If this technology could be developed and used in the Arctic, it could make industrial activity in the region more acceptable to some organisations such as government regulators because it would produce fewer emissions and also require less surface equipment. This would produce a considerable benefit. As Fraser argues: ‘The people with the cleanest and most environmentally sensitive technologies will be the ones who get the licences.’ If down-hole processing evolves, Maitland envisages fairly modest facilities on the surface. ‘In environmentally sensitive areas, the surface footprint would be quite small. An analogy with underground coal gasification in mining is quite a good one,’ he says. Nevertheless, no commercial backing has been found for a long-term project as yet. Maitland, who is also in charge of investigations on carbon capture and storage (CCS), admits it is early days and the first plant could be decades away. The group’s initial research project examining a down-hole reactor model has consisted of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of water- oil reactions under hydrothermal