Our story: Reducing freshwater use

Reducing freshwater use at our in situ oil sands operation

The aim to reduce the amount of fresh water used at our in situ oil sands operation has driven continuous improvement strategies to create new, more efficient and environmentally effective technologies. At Imperial's Cold Lake, Alberta facility, where bitumen is recovered from subterranean sand beds by injecting massive amounts of steam, the amount of fresh water used to produce a barrel of bitumen has been reduced by almost 90 percent since the project’s inception in the 1970s.  In addition, approximately 95 percent of water that is recovered from producing wells along with bitumen is treated, recycled and re-injected as steam, significantly reducing the freshwater requirement.

Recently, Alberta Environment, which regulates freshwater use, has established a target to increase water use efficiency by 30 percent in all sectors by 2015. In the company's latest license-renewal application for its operations in Cold Lake, Imperial committed to reduce the amount of fresh water used to produce a barrel of bitumen by 30 percent from the current level over the term of the license, ahead of regulations.  Plans to meet this commitment include adding and rerouting steam-bearing pipelines so that more produced and treated water can be used instead of fresh water, using treated water instead of fresh water in vapour recovery operations, and switching to recycled water for chemical slurry tanks in the facility’s Maskwa plant.

While this work was progressing during 2009, operating personnel constructed a new pipeline to carry steam from treated-and-recycled water that was temporarily not required at the facility’s Makheses plant to the adjacent Leming plant, which is normally dependent on fresh water. As a result, freshwater use in the Leming plant was reduced by 50 percent.  Total freshwater use across Cold Lake operations was 12 percent lower in 2009 than in 2008, and 30 percent lower in early 2010 than in the corresponding period of 2009.