Our clients from diverse industries share a need for process engineering expertise. We provide a combination of chemistry and engineering skills to create or advance continuous processes in the areas below.
Production Engineering
SRC helps companies find more effective and lower cost techniques to treat their produced fluids. The focus is on oil-water emulsion separation processes. Most recently SRC is developing a coalescer column to speed emulsion separation, thereby reducing the required residence time, heat, and chemicals.
Products from Gasification
Biomass and other organic derivatives such as coal and oil can be readily gasified to make a synthetic fuel gas. This syngas can be burned to generate electricity and heat, or converted into liquid compounds like ethanol or conventional hydrocarbons. Opportunities abound to apply this technology as a way to eliminate unwanted residues and create real value. SRC works to build teams of partners and technology providers to apply gasification technology.
Ethanol
SRC has done considerable work to develop cellulose-to-ethanol processes. Cellulose is a low-value, abundant raw material found in wood and agricultural residues. The payoff with this work will be a process that can make ethanol that will cost less than competing fuels from crude oil.
Heavy Oil Upgrading
SRC has developed lower-cost and smaller-scale upgrading options for heavy oil producers. Our focus has been two novel, simple partial upgrading technologies. The first is a reasonably mature technology available for testing at a demonstration scale. It employs supercritical water to reduce the density and viscosity of heavy oil with minimum coke and light gas formation. The second technique uses ionic liquids which can cause cracking reactions at low temperatures. SRC is also working to identify technology packages that will combine some degree of upgrading and either solvent or heat generation.
Wastewater Treatment
SRC has expertise in the application of biofilm reactor technology to treat wastewater. This simple technique uses a bacterial culture to consume undesirable organics in a water stream. The biofilm reduces organics in water streams in relatively short periods with very low operating costs.
Industrial Chemical Processes
SRC has expertise in developing and commercializing industrial chemical processes. Most of our work in this area has focused on converting sodium sulphate to more marketable and valuable products. Recently SRC has worked to process other residue streams into valuable commodities.
Mobile Pilot Lab
A portable field laboratory, configured to provide a variety of typical oil field analyses, is available. It is suitable for use during field pilot projects where up-to-the-minute analysis is useful for monitoring progress and impact.
Key Contacts:
Gasification, Upgrading, Industrial Chemicals, Mobile Field Lab: Doug Soveran, soveran@src.sk.ca, 306-787-9331
Production Engineering: Gay Renouf, renouf@src.sk.ca, 306-787-9389
