Getting extra heavy oil to market: tight oil and gas synergy and impact on blending, transportation and partial upgrading alternatives including Partially Upgraded Thermal Cracked Product Challenges: Dienes, Gums, Self-Incompatible Asphaltenes, Solids, Emissions, Evaluation, Pricing, and Current Issues Review

摘要

Heavy oil and bitumen basins are distributed around the world; they represent a higher cost, but profitable segment of petroleum. Production and transportation challenges were solved using diluent crude, condensate, or fully upgraded synthetic crude oil. During a period of high cost of natural gas and diluent, and a high differential between light and heavy crude, various partial upgrading methods were proposed and promoted, but not built. Conventional oil and gas production areas were abandoned and production followed discoveries, until the last few years and the revolution of fracking tight oil and gas. More recently exploration has revealed vast quantities of tight oil and gas, much roughly in the same geographic locations that were previously abandoned. The US is leading in production of tight oil and gas. Other locations will catch up. Tight oil and gas provide light crude and condensates at lower prices for blending with heavy oil and bitumen. The surge in tight, light oil has decreased the price of light crude. Certain refineries modified for heavier crude, increasing demand and relatively raising the price of heavy crude, as a result the price differential between light and heavy crude has decreased. Tight gas has lowered the natural gas prices in the US and recently reported in Canada. Lower natural gas price lowers the cost of steam, and the cost of heavy oil production. Tight oil and gas might represent competition to heavy oil, but also represent a new era of lower cost natural gas and lower cost diluent. In many locations the tight oil and gas appear in formations near the heavy oil to provide a lower cost of production for the combined blended stream. There is always a series of alternatives that are considered with heavy oil. Some of these alternatives are in papers at this conference, previous WHOCs and HOLAs. These alternatives are summarized in other papers. Overall, Under the current economic environment and flow assurance considerations the blending alternative was selected, no commercial partial upgrading has been constructed. Otherwise there are still partial upgrading schemes being proposed, but none have been built at a scale to provide an acceptable commercial demonstration or been demonstrated in the field.