Steam from solar energy used to pump heavy oil

Fuel Fix:

In a remote stretch of the Omani desert, row after row of long, curved mirrors collect the sun’s energy.

Similar facilities have been gathering sunlight in the Southern California desert for years, using the focused light to generate electricity. In Oman, however, the facility generates steam. Pipes shunt the steam underground, where it coaxes heavy oil from the rocks.

The new solar steam plant is the first of its kind in the Middle East. It was built by GlassPoint Solar, a Fremont company that uses renewable power to squeeze oil from the ground.

GlassPoint, which has raised about $32 million in venture capital, has a small pilot plant in Kern County that has been generating steam for two years. The Oman plant, whose successful startup the company announced Tuesday, is 27 times bigger, producing an average of 50 tons of steam per day.

It may seem odd that a country perched on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula would need solar power to pump oil. But the arrangement makes sense for Oman.

Oman doesn’t have the massive oil reserves of some of its neighbors, and its production started declining more than 10 years ago, said John O’Donnell, GlassPoint’s vice president of business development. Steam-flooding an old field can help boost production. Plus, Oman has heavy oil deposits that are hard to develop without steam.

Most steam-flooding operations burn natural gas to generate the steam. But Oman doesn’t have large gas reserves of its own. And the price of importing it is high, more than three times its current cost in the United States, O’Donnell said.
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It is rare to see a solar application that actually enhances efficiency.  Most solar applications actually are expensive and inefficient.  This process might help places like Venezuela which has a lot of heavy crude, but that country has not been very smart in extracting their oil in recent decades.