Oil Sands

Anyone filling their car with petrol will know that the balance of supply and demand has changed markedly in recent years. Growth in liquid fuels demand is likely to continue for a number of years, largely driven by further economic development in countries where “mobility” until recently often meant a bicycle or a donkey. To match this growing demand, in a world where it is becoming harder to find new sources of conventional oil, many look to less conventional resources like the bitumen contained in the vast deposits of oil sands in Canada and elsewhere.

But what are the oil sands? How did they come to be found where they are? Why have they not been more widely produced until now, and what are the technical challenges involved in producing them? And can they be developed and produced in a responsible and sustainable way?

In this lecture, we will examine where the unconventional oil resources are, and try to understand a little of their millions of years of history. Coming to the present, we will look at the processes being used to extract the hydrocarbon fuel from the oilsands, and why some techniques work very well and others not at all. This will lead into a discussion of the geological and engineering challenges we face looking to the future, if the world is to benefit from the full potential of oil sands – and we will take a short diversion to examine the even tougher challenge of producing fuel from the earth’s oil shale deposits.

The intensive nature of the techniques used to produce from the oil sands today should also cause us to reflect on how to manage the social and environmental impact of oil sands operations. These range from the local impacts – water consumption, for example – to the truly global impacts, like Carbon Dioxide emissions. We will examine what is being done to keep the impacts within acceptable limits, and what more might need to happen to make oil sands production fit within an acceptable climate change trajectory.

The oil sands represent both a huge opportunity, and a real challenge to the next generation of geologists and engineers, and this lecture will lay out the challenge in simple terms and with illustration by examples from within Shell and from elsewhere.

You can now view this presentation online.

Speaker

John Barry (Shell)

Biography

John’s current role in Shell is Vice President Unconventionals and EOR, based in Rijswijk in the Netherlands. He is also the leadership champion for CO2 management in Shell International Exploration and Production.

Until November 2005 John was Shell's Country Chair in Russia, based in Moscow, and had an eventful time looking after Shell’s interests in a small downstream business and two very large upstream Joint Ventures – Sakhalin Energy, and Salym Petroleum Development. Prior to that he spent three years in Port Harcourt as Development Director of SPDC Nigeria, responsible for drilling and seismic operations, and for execution of a number of major projects including the EA field offshore FPSO development.

His previous assignments included time in the UK, Gabon and Oman. He joined Shell in 1983 after studying physics at the Universities of Oxford (BA) and Cambridge (PhD) in England, and his subsequent early career was spent as a reservoir engineer.