Abstract
Abstract. Improved technologies and approaches to reliably measure and quantify fugitive greenhouse gas emissions from oil sands operations are needed to accurately assess emissions and develop mitigation strategies that minimize the cost impact of future production. While several methods have been explored, the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of emissions from oil sand mines and tailings ponds suggests an ideal approach would continuously sample an area of interest with spatial and temporal resolution high enough to identify and apportion emissions to specific areas and locations within the measurement footprint. In this work we demonstrate a novel approach to estimating greenhouse gas emissions from oil sands tailings ponds and open-pit mines. The approach utilizes the GreenLITE™ gas concentration measurement system, which employs a laser-absorption-spectroscopy-based, open-path, integrated column measurement in conjunction with an inverse dispersion model to estimate methane (CH4) emission rates from an oil sands facility located in the Athabasca region of Alberta, Canada. The system was deployed for extended periods of time in the summer of 2019 and spring of 2020. CH4 emissions from a tailings pond were estimated to be 7.2 metric tons per day (t/d) for July–October 2019, and 5.1 t/d for March–July 2020. CH4 emissions from an open-pit mine were estimated to be 24.6 t/d for September–October 2019. Uncertainty in retrieved emission for the tailings pond in March–July 2020 is estimated to be 2.9 t/d. Descriptions of the measurement system, measurement campaigns, emission retrieval scheme, and emission results are provided.
Highlights
Oils sands are a natural combination of sand, water, clay, and bitumen – a viscous hydrocarbon mixture – that are a source of unconventional petroleum and can be refined to produce crude oil
While all three regions are suitable for production using in situ “drilling in place” methods, such as cyclic steam stimulation (CSS) or steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD), the Athabasca region is suited to surface mining due to the relatively shallow depth of bitumen deposits
The GreenLITETM concentration measurements were combined with locally measured surface weather information, including air temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind speed, and wind direction; publicly available numerical weather prediction (NWP) Rapid Refresh (Benjamin et al, 2016) upper-air model fields; and terrain information derived from the Canadian Digital Elevation Model (DEM) (NRCan (Natural Resources Canada), 2016) to form the inputs to the Second-Order Closure Integrated Puff Model with Chemistry (SCICHEM) dispersion model (Chowdhury et al, 2015)
Summary
Oils sands are a natural combination of sand, water, clay, and bitumen – a viscous hydrocarbon mixture – that are a source of unconventional petroleum and can be refined to produce crude oil. Flux chambers (Klenbusch, 1986) have been traditionally employed to estimate emission rates in the Alberta oil sands but typically measure a small area (∼ 0.13 m2) for a short duration (0.5–1 h) This approach does not account for variability in emissions over time, and many samples across an entire site of interest are needed to account for non-uniform emissions from heterogenous sources such as oil sands tailings ponds and mines (Small et al, 2015). The approach utilizes the GreenLITETM gas concentration measurement system, which employs a laser-absorptionspectroscopy-based, open-path, integrated column measurement in conjunction with an IDM to estimate methane emission rates from an oil sands tailings pond and an open-pit mine located in the Athabasca region of Alberta, Canada. Descriptions of the measurement system, measurement campaigns, emission retrieval scheme, and emission results are provided
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