mine capacity.”
An expansion phase is sched-
uled for start-up in 2015.
“Our expectation is that it
will produce in the range of
345,000 barrels a day for 40-
plus years,” he added.
On-site water storage capabil-
ity will store Athabasca River
water in the high-flow period
in spring, to ease water with-
drawal during lower-flow pe-
riods of the year. Tailings sys-
tems will be in place, which
will intercept and thicken the
tailings, or leftover residue
from bitumen refining. Site
reclamation and remediation,
a continuous process over the
life of the project, will bring
back native plants to exhaust-
ed sites. Water fowl deterrent
systems will protect local mi-
grant birds.
Imperial is setting a tone for
environmental planning in the
region, but Rolheiser down-
plays whether the innovations
have paved the way for bench-
marks in the oil sands indus-
try, chalking up the many
good projects they deploy as
merely due diligence.
“Our approach is easily de-
scribed as design-one, build
multiple,” he said. “The Ke-
arl expansion phase, which is
currently under construction,
will be a carbon copy of the
existing Kearl initial develop-
ment.
“What that does is you only
have to do engineering once
rather than twice. It also
brings new production in a
more gradual manner. There’s
inherent advantages, rather
than bringing 345,000 bar-
rels a day to market in a single
stroke, to doing that over a
phased period of time. That
allows you to tailor and match
growth to market conditions.”
timated at 4.6 billion barrels,
and the potential to double
Imperial Oil’s production by
10
business elite canada
H
AUGUST 2013
