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CSP is generally seen as helping Middle Eastern countries to save more of their oil for export. But it could have a role in extracting the oil in the first place, too
It is all about oil in the Middle East. Countries such as Saudi Arabia have gotten rich on the black stuff but are now waking up to the fact that the party could one day be over: their reserves are finite.
In a bid to preserve as much of what they have for export, they are turning to alternative sources of energy, including CSP, to cater for soaring domestic power demand.
In some places, though, solar thermal could be important not just an alternative power source to native oil reserves. It could also help create more of the valuable product in the first place. Take Oman, for example.
Listed as one of the most developed and stable countries in the Arab world, Oman is cited by observers as being a poster child of petrochemical development. Between 60% and 70% of its gross domestic product comes from oil production.
Compared to many of its Gulf neighbours, however, Oman has relatively limited supplies to support its continued development in the future.
BP estimates that Oman’s reserve-to-production ratio gives it about 17 more years’ worth of production at current rates, as opposed to 97 for Kuwait and around 300 for Saudi Arabia. The country knows it has to diversify its economy, and is doing all it can to achieve that.
With so little time, though, it is also looking for new ways to keep oil production going. It turns out CSP might be part of the answer.
At one of the country’s most remote oil fields, 800 km away from the nearest urban centre, Oman’s largest hydrocarbon exploration and production company, the government-owned Petroleum Development Oman, is using CSP for a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR)
Injecting steam
EOR comes in various flavours but in Oman, which is a world leader in the technique, it often relies on injecting steam into an oil field to heat crude so it can be extracted more easily.
The process allows up to 60% of a reservoir’s total reserves to be recovered, compared to between 20% and 40% with traditional methods. Water for the steam can be obtained from the slurry brought to the surface during extraction.
The problem is that EOR is quite energy-intensive. And if you are trying to preserve as much petrochemical product as possible for export then it does not make sense to use large amounts of natural gas as part of the production process. That is where CSP comes in.
At the Petroleum Development Oman plant, an American company called GlassPoint has been using a specially designed CSP setup to provide the steam for EOR since December last year.
“The company was founded on the premise of bringing a technology to market that very significantly changes the cost of solar steam,” says GlassPoint’s vice president of business development, John O’Donnell.
In places such as Oman, he says, GlassPoint’s technology puts solar steam on a par with what it would cost to produce it by burning fossil fuels. GlassPoint uses trough collectors but these are enclosed in a greenhouse to protect them from wind and sand.
This means the troughs themselves can be very flimsy, weighing about 90% less than traditional models, and yet still work perfectly under harsh desert conditions. O’Donnell points out that wear and tear is a significant issue for solar power in the region.
Drivers in the Gulf typically need to change their sandblasted windshields four times a year, he says. But greenhouse manufacturers have been building in these conditions for decades, so using their readily available products to encase the solar field makes a lot of sense
Pilot plant
GlassPoint first tried out the concept in 2011 with a 300kW pilot plant at Berry Petroleum’s 21Z lease in Kern County, California, USA.
The 7MW Oman installation is the company’s second project, although O’Donnell reports interest from the owners of a number of other sites in the region. Other CSP players are investigating the potential of EOR, too.
Abengoa Solar lists EOR among the potential industrial applications for its products.
And BrightSource Energy last year launched a 29MW demonstration project with Chevron in Coalinga, California which “continues to exceed its performance targets,” according to the CSP company. So far only GlassPoint has built a CSP business entirely devoted to EOR, though.
“We’ve nailed our colours to the mast,” indicates O’Donnell. “We want to do one thing well rather than going after a number of things. We expect later this year to have comments about other projects.”
Logan Goldie-Scot, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, suggests this could be a sweet spot for small CSP developers. “Undertaking an EOR project, and the type of EOR used, all depends on the field in question, the viscosity and the amount of reserves,” he says.
“I imagine it makes sense for many sites.”
To respond to this article, please write to Jason Deign
Or contact the editor, Jennifer Muirhead
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