Solar technology can use heat from the sun to extract heavy crude from aging fields—and the idea is gaining ground and investment from big oil companies like Shell.
Last week, Royal Dutch Shell Plc. (RDSA), RockPort Capital and a few others invested a total of $26 million in California-based GlassPoint Solar Inc. The investment will spur the company’s expansion in the Middle East--and it’s all about crude oil extraction.
What the energy majors are eyeing in particular is GlassPoint’s Enclosed Trough Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) enhanced oil recovery (EOR) process. In less acronymic terms, it is technology that uses solar to tap into wells that have already been “played out” but in which at least one-third of their potential heavy oil is not recoverable by conventional drilling and pumping means.
Typically, tapping into “played out” wells is done by using natural gas to boil water into pressurized steam to flood the well and make the oil more fluid for pumping.
And recent studies show that solar EOR may be better than natural gas EOR. Specifically, solar EOR can produce 16% more oil from a played-out well than natural gas processes—and there is no fuel cost. So the process works better and is more economically viable.
GlassPoint, though, is not the pioneer of this technology. ARCO came up with it in the early 1980s, but it wasn’t cost-effective. But since then, BrightSource Energy (BSE) has taken the technology to new heights and taps into aging wells for Chevron (NYSE:CVX) in the Coalinga oil field. BSE has spent $67.3 million on this project, which began in earnest last year.
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