Cyclic Steam Oil Emission Calculator

It seems as all three are working against the oil industry. Oil rates go down, emissions go up, prices are never high enough and we expect our pay to go up.

California’s oil production is under regulatory, political and social pressures to be cleaner. The industry seems to fight these pressures, rather than use them. California heavy oil is some of the highest emission intensive oil in the world. This emissions efficiency is called carbon intensity, emissions per economic output or barrels of oil for our purposes.

Carbon Intensity, CI = Emissions (kgCO2) / Barrels Oil (bo)

Which is directly related to thermal oil recovery’s efficiency metric, steam oil ratio, SOR.

Steam Oil Ratio, SOR = Barrels Steam (bs) / Barrels Oil (bo)

World class SOR is 3.0 and a larger SOR means less economical. Said another way, a higher SOR relates to higher operating costs (OPEX) mostly due to cost of natural gas. Here we will just be speaking about the cost of fuel for the OPEX case.

One mcf of natural gas generates about 2.85 barrels of steam. With gas price’s at $3.57 / mcf, the fuel cost for steam is $1.25 / bs.

OPEX_fuel$/bs = $3.57 / 2.85 bs = $1.25 / bs per mcf burned

There are many variations of impacting emissions based on field equipment, for this article, we will say steam emits 28.18 kgCO₂/ bs. World class (SOR = 3) carbon intensity just from steam is 84.54 kgCO₂ / bo.

Emissions / bs = 28.18 kgCO₂ / bs

California has a credit program for companies reducing emissions, which currently trade at $65.00 per ton CO₂ reduced or eliminated.

Credit $ / bs = .02818 * $65 credit = $1.83 credit / bs

The credit qualifies for cleaner methods that replace the baseline scenario (steam in heavy oil) with lower emissions. For example, solar used to provide electricity in oilfields qualify for this credit. The innovating method must lower emissions and create some additionality, is the key word.

A replacing innovation can solve all three challenges, simultaneously. When you can produce the same amount of oil AND reduce emissions. The last question, is it economical? We are getting closer! The industry can no longer think that being cleaner is uneconomical. Cleaner is improved efficiencies, we now just need to consider emissions as part of the equation. Which starts with understanding carbon intensity and your biggest emissions from your expertise.

California Air Resources Board, CARB, is responsible for the credit. They have created a category called the Innovative Crude Production Method, the sole purpose of reducing upstream oil and gas emissions.

We are petitioning CARB to include a category that is Chemistry replacing Steam. These are pH neutral chemistry stimulations that replace cyclic steam based on incremental oil produced. The incremental oil is the additionality, and direct replacement for cyclic steam, directly correlated to the SOR.

The emissions are 60-80% lower than steam. The breakeven depends on the cost of incremental oil, the price of gas and the steam oil ratio. In current price environments, without the credit, $15 / incremental bo produced, the breakeven SOR is 12. Without the credit, there is no oilfield SOR reported higher than 12.0 in California. With the credit, the breakeven SOR becomes 4.87 where 8 out of 9 fields, economical could make the switch. With the credit there are 355 million barrels of steam that could be reduced. A 100% adoption value would reduce over 10,000,000 tons CO2 reduced. We do not say 100% adoption is reasonable today, but 30% is, especially when the economic incentive is there to produce more oil, cleaner and profitable.

The economics of approving this innovation is incremental oil minus the incremental oil cost, minus the fuel cost of steam replaced plus the credit for emissions avoided.

Econ_inno = ($Cost_incbo) – SOR * ($OPEX_fuel + $Credit)

Econ_inno = ($15 / bo) – SOR * ($1.25 / bs + $1.83 / bs)

Econ_inno = $15 / bo – (SOR * $3.08 / bs)

We are able to deliver incremental oil for $15 barrel of oil, guaranteed. The steam oil ratio over 4.87 is economical to use chemistry to replace steam.

The saying “doing what we’ve always done, gives us what we got”. Producing the same decline, the same emissions somewhere within an up and down price cycle.

Leave your comments below, tell us what you think. What are your biggest emissions contributions and ask yourself, how can you produce oil without them? This may get you thinking about cleaner efficiencies that are economical and impactful! Share what you learned, what you innovate, you never know who it may help!

We invite you to think about Steam Oil Ratio, another way. Increase oil with less emissions. Increase oil without using steam. Making oil without steam, reduces steam, therefore reducing emissions. Everyone is familiar with reducing emissions by cutting steam. The truth in the field is oil production drops. So operators fight reducing steam.

How can you maintain oil production and reduce steam? Chemistry stimulations that make incremental oil ‘replace’ steam directly correlated to a field’s SOR. From experience, cyclic Steam Oil Ratio, is much higher than continuous, but operators don’t separate the two, yet.