the water could then be recycled and used to extract more oil—meaning the companies would have to use less water and burn less fuel heating it.
“If we can make this even 1 percent more energy efficient and cleaner, the impact could be profound,” says Soane.
To scale up and test the technology, Soane’s 9-employee startup received an undisclosed amount of financing last fall from Intervale Capital, a private equity fund that invests in oil and gas services. CTTV Investments, the venture capital arm of Chevron, also participated in the round.
The chemistry involved isn’t complicated—“if you slightly tweak some of the polymers that are produced today in the millions of pounds yearly, you get the property you need,” Soane says—but combining activators and tethers has never been done before on a large scale. So proving the technology, Soane says, will take a lot of engineering design work, probably followed by more investment.
“It’s still a long road between proof of concept and commercial reality,” he says. “A lot of the success will depend on the willingness and conviction of people around us—our partners and customers, who are really the same people—and perseverance, and of course financial horsepower.”
It may help that that Energy Resources Conservation Board of the province of Alberta strengthened environmental regulations last year, requiring oil sands operators to file plans for capturing and reclaiming the fines in tailings ponds and to make better use of water recycling technology. By 2015, operators will have to cut their water use by 30 percent below 2005 levels. Since it’s unlikely that operators will cut oil production to meet these goals—the oil sands provide about 10 percent of the United States’ foreign oil supply—such improvements will only come about through new technologies.
When I met with Soane in January, he’d just returned to the U.S. from Paris, and he said the trip had caused him to reflect on the bind the industrialized world is in: addicted to fossil fuels and their high energy content, and unable, so far, to find workable substitutes. “As the jet ferried my family and me across the pond in six and a half hours, I marveled at the power of fossil fuels,” Soane says. “There is no other technology that can answer that need in the foreseeable future. You can’t fly across the ocean on a nuclear-powered plane, or on gossamer solar cells. But this gift that it took nature billions of years to endow us with, we are depleting in the space of a few hundred years. We have to be good guardians and use this resource wisely.” Which means minimizing the energy and environmental impact of fossil fuel extraction—even if this comes at the cost of prolonging the oil industry’s survival by a few more decades.
