Oilsands Review - September 2006

ENVIRONMENT

PHOTOS: EnCana

EnCana’s drill cuttings recycling facility.

project in sumps or landfills, EnCana recycles the byproduct at the facility, where it’s separated into liquids and solids.

“The bulk of both streams can be reused for other purposes,” the company says. “The new approach eliminates the need to clear forests for sumps and reduces air emissions associated with trucking materials to landfills.”

The fluid stream is recycled as source water for drilling fluids, which the company expects will reduce fresh-water use in its SAGD operations by 50 per cent. The solid stream, which is divided into sand and oily clay, is used in construction and asphalt road capping. The recycled sand is used for building SAGD pads, which can be up to a metre thick, depending on conditions.

“Instead of extracting clean fill from the surrounding forest, as is typical, we investigated building a portion of these pads out of appropriately treated drilling cutting,” the company says.

The oily clay is used to surface roads.

“By leveraging our own resources, people, assets, and finances, we feel we have an opportunity to bring new technologies to market that improve the environmental performance of our own company,” Ward explains.

Petro-Canada, meanwhile, is composting some of its cuttings. In its MacKay River SAGD project-expansion document, the company says that to “minimize drilling fluid volume, liquids will be recycled as much as possible. All remaining drilling fluids will be treated to comply with [provincial] requirements and disposed of by pumping off to the surrounding vegetation,” following government approvals.

The remaining drilling mud and cuttings are composted in an on-site, contained system to “prevent contamination of . . . the surrounding area,” the company says.

Once the compost is suitable for disposal, it is spread on the MacKay

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