An unplanned maintenance outage on TC Energy’s natural gas supply line constrained deliveries to oil sands operators north of Fort MacKay in the first quarter. The 36-inch Fort McKay Mainline feeder from the NGTL System was restricted to 42% of capacity for about 4 days in early March. Combined with extreme cold weather conditions and unplanned maintenance work, Horizon, Syncrude, Kearl and Fort Hills all reported production shortfalls in the first quarter.<\/p>\n
A Q1 miss for Kearl<\/p>\n
Bitumen production at Kearl declined to 259,000 bbl\/day in the first quarter, about 10,000 bbl\/day lower than the same time last year. While Q1 production was expected to be lower than the previous quarter due to cold-weather operating protocols, output was below plan due to the reduction in natural gas supply.<\/p>\n
A major turnaround is being planned for the K1 train this quarter, mirroring last year’s maintenance work on K2. Once completed, maintenance intervals on K1 will be reduced to once every four years, matching turnaround intervals on the K2 train. Quarterly production will be impacted by an estimated 45,000 bbl\/day. <\/p>\n
Imperial says they are advancing several growth initiatives at Kearl, which will improve bitumen recovery, productivity, and reliability.<\/p>\n
The Kearl Flotation Column Cells (KFCC) project is ongoing, and on track to be completed by year-end. The flotation circuit will help reduce bitumen losses from the middlings streams. A similar recovery project is being planned for the coarse sand tailings streams.<\/p>\n
Other improvement projects include the continued upsizing of the hydrotransport lines, mine automation, and other metallurgical enhancements, all aimed at reducing operating costs and improving reliability. Kearl is on track to produce its billionth barrel of oil by the summer.<\/p>\n
Imperial says they remain “very focused” on getting Kearl to a calendar-day capacity of 300,000 bbl\/day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An unplanned maintenance outage on TC Energy’s natural gas supply line constrained deliveries to oil sands operators north…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,61],"class_list":["post-655118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}