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Natural Zeolite Catalysts for the Integrated Cracking, Waterless Extraction and Upgrading of Oilsands Bitumen
DownloadSpring 2012
Canadian oilsands bitumen represents one of the largest petroleum reserves in the world, but extraction of that resource raises significant environmental, operational and quality-related challenges. Current extraction processes are water intensive, generating high volume tailings ponds that are...
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On Organic Liquid Crystal Transfer from Bitumen-Rich to Water-Rich Phases: A Combined Laboratory and SAGD Field Study
DownloadSpring 2014
Hydrocarbon-based liquid-crystal domains were observed in unreacted heavy fractions extracted from Athabasca bitumen and bitumen derived hydrocarbon resource fractions. Transfer of these organic crystalline domains to the water-rich phase during SAGD production is explored here because there...
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Fall 2011
The impact of mixing on diluted bitumen de-watering is studied in two stages using a fractional factorial design of experiments. The first stage evaluates the relative effects of bulk demulsifier dosage, local maximum energy dissipation, and mixing time. The second stage of experiments evaluates...
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Fall 2015
Hydrocarbon-based liquid crystal domains have been identified in unreacted heavy fractions of petroleum from Athabasca bitumen and other hydrocarbon resources worldwide. These liquid crystal domains have also been shown to transfer from the hydrocarbon-rich phase to the water-rich phase during...
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Spring 2017
The basic human right to have safe and clean drinking water cannot be neglected with the ever-rising worldwide need for drinking water that meets global standards. Local monitoring of water sources is even more vital in areas where access to pure drinking water is limited and its processing...
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Phase Behavior and Thermophysical Properties of Athabasca Bitumen and Athabasca Bitumen + Toluene Mixtures in Near-critical Water
DownloadSpring 2014
The phase behavior and thermophysical properties of heavy hydrocarbons + water at elevated temperatures underpins development and implementation of coordinated production and refining processes, where for example, bitumen is produced by a SAGD method (steam assisted gravity drainage) and the...
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Fall 2015
Oil sands bitumen is increasingly recovered by injecting steam into reservoirs using the energy intensive Steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) process. Interest in improving recovery and energy efficiencies have led to an interest in injecting light hydrocarbons along with or instead of steam...
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Spring 2017
Dewatering of the oil sands mature fine tailings (MFT) is studied through pressure filtration following treatment by dual polymer flocculants. Polymer pairs consisting of anionic polyacrylamide (A3335) and cationic polyDADMAC (Alcomer 7115), and A3335 and non-ionic polyethylene oxide (PEO) are...
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Fall 2018
There is a growing need to decrease the viscosity of bitumen using minimal diluent addition to reduce the cost of transportation. However, due to the inherently free radical rich nature of bitumen, even on exposure to low autoxidative conditions adverse effects on the viscosity and hardening of...
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Remediation of bitumen-contaminated sand grains: development of a protocol for washing performance evaluation
DownloadSpring 2010
In the development of a non-aqueous bitumen extraction process, a major obstacle is solvent loss due to hydrocarbon attachment to the reject sand grains. A proposed solution to this problem is to wash (i.e. remediate) the oil-contaminated sand grains with water and surfactants. This research is...