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Q1: Why do we continue to work on oil and gas when we know fossil fuels contribute to carbon emissions and global warming?
Q2: What are the economical implications of this technology/process?
Q3: How does this relate to oilsands?
Q4: How much new reserve will this process/technology generate?
Q5: Is this related to the research that was reported in the Nature publication in December 2007?
Q6: You mention that you anticipate your technologies will have less environmental impacts. Can you explain this? What are the environmental risks?
Q1: Why do we continue to work on oil and gas when we know fossil fuels contribute to carbon emissions and global warming?
A1. Currently 87 per cent of Canada's energy comes from fossil fuels and this will continue for many decades. Profero's LEMUR™ (Low Emission Microbial Upgrading and Recovery) technology will help cut emission by reducing emissions related to upgraders and energy costs in thermal recovery operations. Ultimately if we can crack the technology of hydrogen production from oilfields a truly green oil industry may be feasible. LEMUR offers a convenient greener transition technology for the oil and gas industry away from high emission recovery technologies associated with heavy oil.
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Q2: What are the economical implications of this technology/process?
A2: Currently, many heavy oil companies are forced to abandon production wells with potentially 80-90 per cent of the assets still in the ground. Profero technologies are designed to recover additional heavy oil and gas assets from existing wells that are no longer economically viable. Instead of retrieving oil, our process involves converting the oil to natural gas.
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Q3: How does this relate to oilsands?
A3: Profero Energy may have applications in the oilsand, however the current technologies focus in conventional reserves (heavy oil)
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Q4: How much new reserve will this process/technology generate?
A4: This depends. Currently, many heavy oil companies are only extracting about 17 per cent of the assets in the ground. This leaves a great amount of assets for our technologies to potentially retrieve. We estimate our technologies have the potential to obtain up to an additional 25 per cent of the heavy oil and gas assets from wells that are no longer economically viable.
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Q5: Is this related to the research that was reported in the Nature publication in December 2007?
A5: The research reported in the Nature publication and several other Nature publications provides some of the basis for the technology being used by Profero Energy.
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Q6: You mention that you anticipate your technologies will have less environmental impacts. Can you explain this? What are the environmental risks?
A6: We anticipate our technologies will have less environmental impact for a few reasons:
We will be using existing well infrastructure sites. We are not developing new well sites, which would have a significant impact on the environment.
No new organisms are introduced into reservoirs. Profero's technology works with organisms already present in the environment.
The output we are producing is natural gas, a cleaner burning and lower carbon alternative per unit of energy than heavy oil as energy source.
Although we will require water resources for our procedure, we will primarily be using existing water sources that were already used for the site and require minimal additional requirements.
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