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Show 2 APPLICATION AND SPECIFICATIONS The newly formed San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District has imposed strict new emissions regulations on oilfield operations creating the need for a 30 ppm NOx burner that can destroy H2S laden casing gas. Existing 10w-NOx burner technologies use flue gas recirculation (FGR) to reduce NOx emissions. However FGR burners cannot burn the casing gas because the SOx compounds formed as a product of combustion quickly corrode and destroy the recirculation ducts. Other technologies such as selective catalytic reduction (SCR) are too costly to use in this application. Alzeta has developed a new burner technology for thermally enhanced oil recovery (TEOR). This new burner technology, called the radiation stabilized burner, achieves very low emissions levels without complicated controls such as flue gas recirculation or staged fuel and air. Because NOx and CO emissions are a function of fuel and air ratio only, emissions control is greatly simplified providing higher reliability and lower maintenance costs. Application Thermally enhanced oil recovery is a means of increasing the removal efficiency of heavy crude oil from reservoirs. Natural gas-fired steamers force high pressure steam into heavy crude oil reservoirs to heat, thin and drive the viscous crude to production wells where it can be pumped to the surface by conventional means. California's TEOR operations began in the early 1970's and accelerated in the early 1980's. Approximately 1,500 oilfield steamers operate at 50,000 Ibs/hr steam or 62.5 million Btu/hr each. When TEOR operations began crude oil was the preferred fuel because it was readily available and cheap. Typically a steam generator would burn about 1 barrel of oil for every 3 to 4 barrels produced by the field. In the 1980's and 1990's the choice of fuel shifted from crude oil to natural gas. As new natural gas pipelines were installed, the price of • |