August 2006 - www.promci.qc.ca/pureinvention/oqapa/Strategic_Canadian_Contribution.html
Quasiturbine:
A Strategic Canadian Contribution for reaching Canada's CO₂ Emission Reduction Objectives

By Lloyd Helferty, Engineering Technologist   oqapa@promci.qc.ca

  The technology of the “Quasiturbine” is an extremely important technology for reaching the collective CO2 emission reduction objectives of Canada because the Quasiturbine could potentially revolutionize our built infrastructure over a wide range of energy applications and could result in significant contributions for Canada and the world in meeting our collective CO2 emission reduction objectives.

  The Quasiturbine could potentially dramatically increase the efficiency of our built infrastructure, and could be a key Canadian technologies used to make the built infrastructure of in every country around the world more efficient.

As conventional supplies of non-renewable energy, in particular oil and gas, start to decline, the use of more efficient technologies is the key to transitioning to alternative energy supplies.
  By making our country more efficient in its use of energy, we will not have to use as much money or energy to reach our goal of sustainability.

  Energy efficiency [the amount of real work produced per unit of energy expended] is the first and easiest step for any country to take in order to maintain or increase its real productivity in the face of actual or contractual energy constraints.

   The per capita energy use in per unit of Gross Domestic Product in Canada is dismal -- one of the worst the World.

  A recent study comparing Canada’s environmental record to the other industrialized nations and tracks Canada’s progress (or lack thereof) on environmental issues over the past two decades concluded that “Canada’s economy is inefficient, in that we use much more energy and generate much more pollution to produce a given amount of goods and services relative to our industrial competitors, including 33% more energy than the United States per unit of GDP”. 

•   In the US, the average piece of food is transported almost 1,500 miles before it gets to someone’s plate.
•   In Canada, the average piece of food is transported 5,000 miles from where it is produced to where it is consumed.

  Canadian CO₂ emission reduction objectives are intricately linked to the fossil energy woes of human civilization in the 21^st century.

  Canada, and in particular Northern Alberta, may be set to more than double its ‘Oil Sands’ production to an expected 2.2-3.6 million barrels per day by 2015.
  The fuel industry needs to mine roughly two metric tons of sand to produce one barrel of crude oil.

   In our efforts to get at the oil in the Oil Sands, areas such as those around Fort McMurray in Alberta have been drained of wetlands and stripped of boreal forests.
  Astonishingly, these very forests play an important role in climate regulation and carbon storage and their destruction actually contributes to our net CO₂ emissions!

• About 80% of Alberta's oil sand is too far below the surface to dig up

  The most common method for getting 'Oil Sands' (bitumen) out of the ground is by digging two parallel horizontal wells lined with perforated pipe.
 High-temperature steam that is heated with natural gas, which is then injected down into one of the wells.
 This process of heating the earth softens the surrounding bitumen, causing it to separate from the sand and flow down into the second well, from which it can be pumped to the surface.

  Producing crude oil from the Alberta Oil Sands is an extremely energy ­intensive process.
Giant digging and transportation machines use commensurately large amounts of fuel. Refining and welling technologies consume roughly 30 cubic meters of natural gas per barrel of recovered oil.  Producing a barrel of Oil Sands releases 2-3 times the volume of greenhouse gases than traditional oil production does. By 2015, production from the oil sands is projected to release 94 megatons of greenhouse gases per year.

   To put these numbers in more solid terms, conventional oil has enjoyed a rate of “Energy Return On Energy Invested" (EROEI) of roughly 30:1 over its long history.  The Oil Sands EROEI is only around 1.5:1, which means that 20 times more energy is needed to generate the same amount of oil from the Oil Sands compared to "conventional" sources of oil, which means that ever more natural gas energy will be required in order to attempt to maintain production from the Oil Sands.

  The natural gas volumes needed to unlock the oil in these oil sands are expected to nearly triple in the next decade, thus pushing the price of natural gas even higher as supplies become even tighter.

  It has been shown that prices of the two commodities (oil and natural gas) tend to track each other closely, with the “correlation coefficient” between the two commodities being roughly +0.9, indicating that a change in crude oil prices will result in the same directional change in natural gas prices nine times out of ten.

    The energy efficiency of Natural Gas use in this country is intricately tied to our economic well being.

  For many economic and market forces in Canada, natural gas prices are just as important, and probably even more important, than crude oil.
The value of Canadian producers’ sales from natural gas has been surpassing that from crude oil on a trend basis since 2000.  In fact, on a "BTU-equivalent production basis", natural gas has been turning out more than crude since the late 1980s.  Canada exports more than half of its domestic production of natural gas, with the USA alone importing roughly 60% of Canada's current supply.
 The corresponding percentage for crude is below 30 per cent.

  Natural gas is more important to Canadian businesses and governments.  In terms of direct consumption, residential uses account for less than 30 per cent of natural gas consumption in this country, while about 42 per cent of the commodity is consumed by industries and the remaining by public administration (22 per cent) or for transportation purposes (7 per cent).
  The largest industrial users of natural gas are the chemical and petrochemical and the forest product industries.

  In the case of the petrochemical industry, the natural gas is used not only as a source of energy but also as a feedstock (to make ethylene, the building block in the manufacture of chemicals, e.g. plastics). The fertilizer industry also uses natural gas as a feedstock (to make nitrogen-based fertilizers).  Electric utilities consume about 7 per cent of the available supply of natural gas in Canada while natural gas producers themselves consume more than 20 percent of their own production.

 ** “CANADIAN GAS SUPPLY: GOING UP? OR DOWN?” R.H. Woronuk, Canadian Gas Potential Committee,
            GasEnergy Strategies Inc., p175 - Oakmount Rd. SW Calgary.

  When, not if, the production of natural gas and oil start to decline, the inevitable cost to any country with an inefficient economy will be huge.

  Since Canadian consumers and industry could be considered “profligate wasters of energy” we will thus be in the worst position of any industrialized country when the effects of both National and Global Peak Oil and Gas production begin to show their effects on our individual lives and economy -- if we don't change our habits and infrastructure -- FAST!

   In the very near future we may find ourselves having to import most of our energy once our oil and gas reserves start to seriously decline.

  We will not only see the price of fossil fuels rise dramatically in this country, we will find that our domestic supplies will start to dwindle because we are bound by the rules of NAFTA that essentially states that “we cannot constrain our exports of resources (primarily to the USA) without also constraining our domestic supplies”.

  Any technology that can be used to increase the efficiency of our built infrastructure would be of tremendous benefit to the entire country.

  We need to move away from "traditional" fossil fuel energy supplies toward alternative energy supplies.
  Of course, it cannot be believed that the alternative sources will completely replace the fossil sources in any reasonable period of time; however, we know that we will eventually need to increase the efficiency of our entire built infrastructure.

  This requires that we start replacing our entire built infrastructure.

  A smooth transition from one technology to another will always require some time to undertake.
  In this case the infrastructure renewals that need to be done are on a massive scale, and so will likely require decades of work to do so.

  The technology of the Quasiturbine has the potential make our built infrastructure become significantly more flexible regarding how we use and extract energy.

  Because a Quasiturbine is so flexible, regardless of which technologies are chosen among the multiple competing alternatives that are out there, the Quasiturbine will be able to find a home in many of these applications.  The Quasiturbine has this potential to be used for such a wide variety of purposes because it can be used wherever rotating machines are used today.

   In many of the applications in which there is a rotating device, replacing this rotating machine with a Quasiturbine would bring significant advantages and benefits to the design because of the Quasiturbine’s considerable efficiency and simplicity.

  Every device that is replaced would be one step further toward helping Canada reduce demand on our important fuel sources like Natural Gas by improving the efficiency of fuel use as wells as recovering energy where we have not otherwise done so.

  This technology is one of those essential technologies that will help us become more efficient in both the short and the long term if we are to maintain some semblance of our way of life, in light of the impending worldwide shortages of traditional supplies.



Canadians must not stand back and watch the rest of the World take action on these issues yet do nothing.

  We are in danger here in Canada of falling behind the rest of the world on these issues, just as we fell behind with regard to the use and implementation of other renewable energy technologies like Wind, Solar, and Biomass energy.

  Europe is quite far ahead of us with respect to implementing these technologies.  European researchers are extremely interested in this technology.

  We are in danger of losing our leading-edge position if we don't take the chance to develop this technology here in Canada.

  We are in danger of having to import this same technology from Europe (or possibly Asia) in the years ahead if we do not see the opportunity to develop this technology and turn it into an opportunity.

  We should not simply continue being a country which exports all of our raw materials only to buy them back from other countries and other people once they have been made into completed 'value-added' goods.

Why Quasiturbine?

•   The Quasiturbine has already completed all initial design tests and does not require significant further engineering.
•   The design of the Quasiturbine is elegantly simple, yet its efficiency and usefulness in a variety of applications may be hugely beneficial if we can put the technology to work for us.
•   The Quasiturbine design is inherently very flexible and could be used in various combinations and with multiple energy and fuel sources.
• When using the design in combination with bio-fuels [ex. biogas/methane/methanol etc.], it not only allows us to reduce the supply pressure on the existing fossil energy sources by removing excess demand on those sources, it also has the potential to increase the efficiency of the entire supply chain to consumers, thus extending the lifetime of the remaining fossil energy sources and giving us extra time to build up the alternative capacity that will be replacing the fossil sources.

  But,

•   Quasiturbine applications require serious investments of time and energy by researchers, engineers and other application specialists to create practical engineering solutions.

  The primary barriers to using this technology right now are:

            knowledge that this technology exists
    and

            interest in the technology

  What this technology needs – primarily – are people who will undertake research projects that demonstrate that this technology works.

  This is the purpose of OQAPA www.promci.qc.ca/pureinvention/oqapa