THAI Commences Engineering of First Commercial Unit

This is a timely reminder that THAI technology is continuing to advance. Petrobank Energy is currently building out a CAPRI/THAI pilot well series to complete the technology validation stage.

This is the first commercial field rollout of the technology that is scaled to be replicated throughout the existing Tarsands.

The Tarsands of course are the world’s largest single resource of oil. It represents thirty to fifty percent of known reserves and likely over fifty percent of unexploited reserves. Present day mining methods can only hope to tap a very small fraction of that resource and may already be approaching optimization.

This is the technology that will release the remaining resource on a scale comparable and even surpassing conventional production recoveries.

This first rollout is permitted for 100,000 barrels per day and can be easily replicated to achieve production levels approaching ten and fifteen million barrels per day and I anticipate supplying a third of final global oil demand that will slacken back to under fifty millions of barrels per day.

Simply put, air is driven down an injection well to ignite a combustion front that expands and follows a horizontally laid recovery well. The combustion operates at high temperature and pressure causing oil reforming and slow reservoir stripping. The process fluid already partially reformed passes through a catalytic sleeve in the production well that gives it another reforming boost. This results in two thousand barrels of fluid production with a fifty percent oil cut. The oil has been upgraded from a source gravity of as low as 8 to hot production oil whose gravity is at around 12 for THAI and perhaps 15 to 17 with CAPRI. It will often be pumpable as is and will require markedly less thinning additions.

Combustion byproducts mainly stay in the reservoir and assist in the process itself. Thus the environmental footprint is a small fraction of any other recovery method. It is almost too good to be true, but it has actually worked very well every step to date.

This project can be expected to be complete over the next four years and while it is been implemented the several pilot wells already been operated will help perfect the technology. This should allow another tenfold jump in production to be planned and financed within a couple of years.

I suspect that the only bottleneck facing this company will be the availability of tradesmen. Time to get your welding ticket.



Vista Projects Wins Contract for Major Petrobank Project
http://www.streetinsider.com/Press+Releases/Vista+Projects+Wins+Contract+for+Major+Petrobank+Project/4426248.html
February 23, 2009 9:01 AM EST

CALGARY, ALBERTA--(Marketwire - Feb. 23, 2009) - Calgary-based engineering firm, Vista Projects Limited, announced today that it has been awarded the contract to provide Front End Engineering Design (FEED) services to Petrobank Energy and Resources Ltd. ("Petrobank") for the well pad and pipeline package of Petrobank's May River project. The northern Alberta venture will be a commercial application of Petrobank's patented THAI(TM) (toe to heel air injection) technology, aiming to produce 10,000 barrels of oil per day with no net water use.

"We are delighted to be working with Petrobank for the May River Whitesand project," said Alex Campbell, founder and principal of Vista Projects. "Vista's long history in heavy oil and bitumen processing and its expertise in providing innovative solutions is a good fit for Petrobank's flagship technology and development."

"Vista Projects was selected because we value their track record for solving complex problems in a cost-efficient manner," said Greg Deuchar, Whitesands Project Manager for Petrobank.

Petrobank's THAI(TM) technology is an innovative process in the extraction of bitumen and production of heavy oil. It utilizes an in-situ combustion technique that injects high-pressure air into the structure that ignites the bitumen causing the air to pressure the thermally cracked oil towards the producing well. Water usage is minimal. The revolutionary system offers substantial environmental and operational cost benefits as compared to competing in-situ SAGD or CSS processes due to the minimal usage of energy and water. The process also requires lower capital investment than steam assisted production of bitumen and produces higher quality produced oil.

The Vista Projects well pad design will be the first of its kind to utilize the THAI(TM) technology on a commercial scale. The project will be constructed in three phases and is scheduled for completion in 2010.

About Vista Projects Limited

Vista Projects Limited is a multi-discipline, technical engineering firm providing solutions to energy firms in Western Canada. While Vista has been active in all aspects of the oil and gas market, it has grown to become a leading engineering firm for thermal energy projects, working on some of the most successful SAGD projects in the Alberta Oil Sands.

THAI(TM) is a registered trademark of Archon Technologies Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Petrobank.FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: Brookline Public Relations, Inc. Rebecca Eras Media Contact (403) 538-5641 x 108 Fax: (403) 466-4523 (FAX) Email: reras@brooklinepr.com Source: Petrobank Energy and Resources Ltd.

Buffalo and Industrial Biochar

I got to take a long weekend attending a wedding party in Edmonton for a niece. Good times by all. I chatted up a couple of my favorite subjects and picked up a few tidbits and clarified an idea or two.

The first is that buffalo herds are becoming very visible in Northern Alberta. this suggests that the critical mass exists for a huge herd expansion. More importantly, if they were not economic and easy to ranch, this would not be happening. I am told that they are commonly mixed with beef and have obviously become very fence trained. This was the big concern at the very beginning.

What this tells me is that buffalo have been completely accepted into our animal husbandry culture and that there are plenty of farmers moving into the business. We will all live to see millions of animals from the current 500,000 stock. I also know that a number of plains Indian reservations are actively building herds. There is a certain irony in having the descendants of those icons of the great plains take a leading role in buffalo husbandry.

I also got to talking about biochar and terra preta.. I realized that my hesitancy over using a small ten to twenty ton shipping container as a biochar kiln on the farm is misplaced.

A smaller metal kiln would need a daily charge of 10 to 20 tons of plant waste. If the plant waste is corn stover or bagasse, we are processing one hectare's waste on a daily basis. This should, with normal crop management, draw from a one mile radius which is very typical of the large modern farm. This could be operated on a continuous basis throughout the year.

It would be necessary to store the waste in a convenient form next to the kiln and it would be necessary to also store the biochar product until the time for putting it back into the soil. Once the waste is harvested though, the actual production process could be made into a simple daily chore with a little equipment or even just a large front end shovel.

The oven itself (you may wish to review my earlier postings on shipping container incinerator design) been of two lung design will not leak and all the volatiles driven off go directly back into the heat production cycle. It may be possible at some added expense to capture a part of the volatiles as a byproduct.

Because the container is a sealed device, the packing ratio is not nearly so critical as in the earthen kiln design needed by pre-industrial farmers. In fact it would be convenient to chop the stover as is done anyway, and then to blow the material into wagons and holding bins from which it can be then blown into the kiln. There is a good chance that fairly simple modification of existing equipment will solve the technical problems.

Any such dedicated system is also ideal for disposing of unwanted straw bales and any other agricultural waste.

The important concern, is that we are now describing a system that can be made as automatic as your washer dryer and as time saving. The actual burn process itself is easily monitored and controlled with a little in the way of electrical control systems. It should no longer matter even if you are burning a partial load, as long as the space itself is filled to prevent too many hot spots of full combustion.

The capital cost of such a system is potentially very low with the nasty wild card been the very high temperature bricks needed for the small second lung. The rest can be assembled by any backyard mechanic once the design is tested and shaken out.