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It takes resourcefulness and dogged determination to make something from nothing:
to turn potential into opportunity, to make oil
from oil sand.
How does Canadian Natural do it?
When I first started here
some eight years ago
this is nothing more than pencil scratches on a map,
and at that time we had something in the order of a 150
drill holes. Since that time we've got in excess of 1,600 drill holes, which
have been used to delineate the site.
So that started the whole process once we cleared the trees
and taking off the muskeg.
Muskeg is salvaged and put into the stock pile for future use in the reclamation process.
After the muskeg is removed
then we get into the overburdened.
If you can imagine we've moved well over a 150 million tons of
material to open up this whole behind me.
The overburdened of course is removed
and yields the oil sands, which is ready for delivery to the plant.
so we load that oil sand into
400 tonne trucks. Those 400 tonne trucks
they weight themselves about 250 tonnes. So you can imagine
at any given time trucks traveling down in excess of 50 kilometers an hour
with 650 tonnes of mass.
It's quite an amazing thing, and that happens day in and day out.
We load the ore into these 400 tonne trucks using the big shovels.
Imagine a single car garage attached to the end of the stick.
That's what we have on these large shovels and they'll load the trucks
in essentially four to five passes.
Once it's loaded on the trucks
that material is hauled to the
ore preparation plant and dumped in, at that point it's crushed down to smaller sizes
and hyper transported to the plant.
We had to relocate the Tar river,
in doing so there was some fish habitat that had to be compensated for,
and we have to do that on a two-to-one basis What we did is we actually constructed a lake.
It's out to the west of the tailings area, -
it's going to be stocked with fish. If you talk about an
environmental team working together with an operations team
that was one of the most fabulous things I've ever seen
performed in my career.
The process of bitumen production is the good stuff in the middle.
The mine mines the oil sands for us and
we take that
and crush it and size it in the ore prep plant,
and we add hot water.
that slurry comes up through to the extraction plant and we extract
the bitumen from that slurry
in the sub-cell, the bitumen attached itself to air bubbles, floats to the top and
the sand and rocks go to the bottom of the sub-cell and we send them back out
to the tailings pond,
and the froth goes out to the froth treatment plant, we add naphtha
it mixes with the bitumen, becomes finer allows the fine sand
and water to separate from the bitumen. We send what's called diluted bitmen
off to upgrading to become SCO (synthetic crude oil).
The finished products are
made here and they basically serve as refinery feedstocks to markets south
of us.
The oil, when we receive it
is in the form of diluted bitumen and the first thing we do is warm it up and
we take off the naphtha, which is our diluent, and we return it back
to bitumen production
the bitumen is then brought into the coker unit.
You can see the coker units through the back, they're the tallest structures
and that's where we are essentially crack it thermally and heat it up to
very warm temperatures,
the bottom solidifies, drops to the bottom as coke,
and the vapor goes overhead, and then we split the vapors into untreated naphtha, kerosene or distillate , and gas oil products
and then it comes into the hydrotreaters here, and the first unit way over is our hydrogen plant, where we make our own hydrogen
and we basically add hydrogen to the three products that I mentioned
and what we end up with are basically treated naphtha, distillate, and gas oil
which are then combined
to make our synthetic crude oil.
The unit basically collects the sulphur in molten form, and then we pipeline it to
a PADD area out towards the airport in the north quadrant of the facility.
We cannot come here
without being an active participant into this community
and I think it is important what this project has brought to this
community here, is of tremendous value.