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INTRODUCTION
My name is Ray Hopkins, I am a father of 3 amazing and beautiful little girls and we reside in Southern Alberta. I am a Canadian Certified Safety Professional who grew up working in the agriculture industry moving on to the financial sector, telecommunications, oil and gas, high technology, and now my mission is to utilize my life experiences to change the world for my children.
OBJECTIVE
Humanity has a simple objective, survival. We live, learn, love, and ensure that our future generations are more sustainable and the hardships that we have learned from are not repeated individually and collectively as a species. The objective of the Hamilton - Charmont Solar Dome Project or HCSD is to fund the further research, development, design, and product realization for an integrated energy infrastructure solution that solves real world oil and gas operational issues with solar technology and architecture. The final results will maximize oil and gas operational efficiency, reduce operating costs, enhance public safety, provide additional revenue streams to the public/industry partners, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The idea was sparked after attending a safety presentation by Julie Hamilton while I was working for Canada’s largest natural gas producer as an operator and health and safety committee chairman. Her talk was entitled “Missing Tim”, it was a heartfelt story about a mother and her loss. Julie is Tim’s mom, her son and another young man who were putting up a party tent for a large energy corporation client breakfast were involved in a tragic workplace incident. It was dark and the power arched from a 14,000 volt line Julie's son was killed instantly, the other young man was hospitalized and spent several weeks in the burn unit. When Julie was telling her story it reminded me of another tragic incident where a young man had died just one year before. The swab rig he was operating in the gas field I worked in was cleaning out built up water from gas wells in the area, the vehicle made contact with an overhead powerline and he was killed instantly. During Julie’s presentation I struggled to hold back tears as she explained her loss and how it impacted her family.
That evening after Julie's presentation I decided that there was a better way and I was going to find it. I spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours on the job and off the job researching over the next 6 years what that solution would be. I believed it would start with a vision for the future, and understanding of the past, and the operational know how on how that future would work in the real world. As an operator in the field we were struggling with a non-conventional shallow gas play called coal bed methane, in the winter time a large portion of these wells would freeze. Hundreds, if not thousands of them; they were producing a non-saline water, it was expensive to hire swab rigs, and the wells did not make much gas, the solution was to pump a highly carcinogenic chemical down the well head. Day in and day out this was the winter job. This exercise in futility would drive gas prices up in the winter time, and in the summer time when gas prices were lower the company would strategically hire swab rigs that would clean out the wells on a schedule for gas to be routed to a nearby electrical co-generation facility. I understood this dynamic very well as I had performed an audit on the co-generation facility and a lion share of the gas compressor stations the company operated in my role as health & safety committee chairman.
I approached the company with an idea to utilize low cost insulated geodesic structures over the gas wells and utilize a simplified parabolic solar stirling engine to recycle heated glycol to enhance production and reduce the use of methanol. There was a future behind this idea. The company was not interested in my idea. In opposition they asked me to utilize a gas powered engine to pump methanol which I refused and then presented an electric pump to use which I also refused for safety reasons. I was subsequently terminated from my position. The company then deployed a fibreglass structure over gas wells based on a misinterpreted concept of my original idea. This structure increased risk.
In 2010 while I was employed as a Health & Safety Coordinator for SMART Technologies I was informed that an instrumentation and electrical colleague and his son (Chris & Jon Charmont) were killed in a natural gas explosion in Mexico. I knew this gentleman well and this extremely sad story further focused the direction of the vision and need for structures over uncovered oil and gas wells. Many of the gas wells that Chris and I worked with had utilized a pressure relief device for engineering reasons, with the known fact that these devices are not to be used once relieved and operations could not keep up with the freezing conditions in the winter time; I knew that the potential for inhibited functionality was a very real risk and safety concern.
In grateful memory of all those we have lost in the oil and gas industry this project is named the Hamilton - Charmont Solar Dome.
TODAY
Today Canada faces many challenges regarding our oil and gas industry, specifically our competitiveness regarding the price of oil and gas, royalty taxes, greenhouse gas targets, aboriginal relations, and of course the geo and partisan politics that parlay with those particular aspects and outcomes. The Unites States has made significant gains regarding their “Energy Independence by 2016” goal and has utilized the geo and partisan politics to their economic benefit. As a Canadian I see this with pipeline delays, layoffs, and more importantly the price and trade agreements we have in place regarding our natural resource plays that we depend on.
One of those plays that has been economically benefiting is the shale gas play, the electric car manufacturing market, lithium ion battery manufacturing, and “free” solar charging stations across both Canada and the US. These have become dominant economic drivers and factors for the United States with a significant cost to Canadian economics now and into the future ahead.
These factors have added inspiration and the immediate need to integrate zero footprint, zero emission solar technology that will lead the world in improved security, health, & safety, at the oil and gas wellhead. Future revenue can be used to balance royalty taxes on oil and gas wells with the carbon taxes, produce additional federal/provincial/community based revenue streams, and increase Canada’s ability to export clean integrated electricity and natural resources to the United States into the future.
POTENTIAL FUGITIVE EMISSIONS
A number of scientific published articles have indicated that a large number of abandoned oil and gas wells may be leaking significant quantities of potent greenhouse gas methane emissions in North America (Source: American Scientific published article - December 9, 2014). Through a lack of data and monitoring capability of remote wells that do not have measuring capability at the wellhead it is unclear if a large number of active wells are not leaking significant quantities of methane. Then Environmental Protection Agency of the United States has stated that Methane (CH4) is the second most prevalent greenhouse gas emitted in the United States and Methane's lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter than carbon dioxide (CO2), but CH4 is more efficient at trapping radiation than CO2. Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 on climate change is 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period. On December 8, 2014 the Vancouver Sun published an estimate that 10% of Alberta and B.C. gas and oil wells may leak.
While it is currently impossible to provide an accurate estimate of how much fugitive methane is actually being released it is assumed that a percentage of active and abandoned wells do leak methane into the atmosphere based on publications, reports and industry experience.
For the purposes of the providing a CO2 value a conservative assumption of 10:1000 active gas wells leaks could leak 100 (Ccf) cubic meters of fugitive natural gas per day cumulatively. This variation could account for potential production differentials on a well per well basis averaging and a higher frequency of minor fugitive emission leaks per 1000 compared to significant emission leaks per 10,000 and major emission leaks per 100,000. In most regions of Canada and the U.S., low pressure/low production, coalbed methane wells produce between 100 and 500 thousand cubic feet (Mcf) of natural gas per day.
The estimated metric ton equivalent of C02e results in 1.6929371 Metric Tons of CO2e per day and 617.9220415 Metric Tons of CO2e per year based on the assumption that 10 out of 1000 active gas wells could leak 100 cubic meters of fugitive natural gas per day cumulatively.
Equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 130 passenger vehicles, 85 homes electricity use for one year, or 256,880 litres of gasoline consumed.
For 100,000 wells the value would be approximately 6017 Metric Tons of CO2e per year. Equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 12,989 passenger vehicles, 8487 homes electricity use for one year, or 25,688,082 litres of gasoline consumed.
Conversion factor reference, EPA websites and chart below:
http://www.epa.gov/gasstar/tools/calculations.html
http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/calculator.html#results
http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/refs.html
We just don’t know what the actual emissions are and this presents real world risks in a world that is trying to firstly identify sources.
THE TRANSITION
The world is becoming extremely competitive in the energy marketplace, people are involved in and outside of the industry becoming more informed. With these factors industry experts realize a few challenges along the way. Regulatory frameworks are complex, energy sectors utilize a silo approach, opinions become divisive, and community and stakeholder engagement is suffering.
We see the North American marketplace pumping billions of tax dollars into the renewable and “clean” energy sector with very few if any known projects integrating into the fossil fuel sector and no public ownership of the new market being funded by the public. The fossil fuel industry struggles with getting product to market and funds lobby groups to educate the public in what seems to be a polarizing social experiment that is doing anything but bring the communities and stakeholders together in the energy marketplace.
My analysis of the twenty first century challenges takes into account two viewpoints, the short term immediate issues at a 30” view and the big picture issues regarding current infrastructure and our energy needs at a 30,000 foot view. At 30” we see society has reached a boiling point, in the papers, social media, the news, it has become obvious an offense and a defence has been formed and power struggles have become positions of debate and civil disobedience in all the layers of society. At the 30,000 foot view we see solution sets appear to be polarized with the large renewable projects well underway or being completed with additional taxes being levied on the fossil fuel industries and very little transitional progress in solving what the landscape actually looks like.
In my view this presents an opportunity to remind ourselves that as a global society we will not be able to solve our problems with the solution sets that created them. This does not mean we abandon the hard work, the blood, sweat, and tears of what past and the current generations have built however. We know there is a call for immediate action, and if we boil it down we should take the opportunity to utilize our existing infrastructure as a springboard into the future that will bring energy sectors together, opinions that matter heard, and continue to build a future that realizes the fossil fuel industry is our natural partner in a just and balanced future. We must recognize both corporate, societal, and the individual needs of the people on this planet for generations today and well into the future.
So how do we do it? Bankrupting the industries that have paved our roads, built our hospitals/schools, given us universal health care, and paid the very wages of teachers, doctors, nurses, public workers is surely not the way. Building wind farms and solar fields with tax dollars will surely bankrupt our society in the long term without a shift in how this actually works today and into our future.
THE SOLUTION
If we take care of the small things the big things will take care of themselves, I believe this to be true. The lion share of our revenue in Canadian society is coming from a well developed oil and gas infrastructure. We know there are issues, we know we are not solving those immediate issues with our long term solutions both as an industry and as a society at large. We must come together.
By starting at the wellhead with an integrated geodesic solar structure that improves the operational performance, addresses security and safety concerns, and produces an additional revenue stream and infrastructure we can start building a collaborative energy future together today. I believe this solution and the architecture should be owned 25% by the people who pay for it. This means when government grants are accessed the public actually owns the capital investment, this does not make the revenue generated null and void but a balance between after tax and before tax dollars. This is a promise I make of the project.
I NEED YOUR HELP
While there is billions of dollars being invested in the renewable energy market I have personally been unable to tap into the government grants available. Many of them require a substantial personal investment and many unnecessary steps to realize a product initiative. This may be why the the North American Energy Sector looks the way it does today. My focus is not to change the way it works but to raise the necessary capital investment needed to tap into the available grants and realize a product for us all. A simple belief really, no one of us is as smart as all of us and I need a team of people to work on this together.
I want this to be my full time job and bring on professional contractors and employees to bring this idea to a reality.
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