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Spring 2017

Ma, Xinrui

The formation of stable water-in-oil emulsions during oil sands extraction process causes a number of operational issues, such as equipment corrosion, storage and transportation problems. One common method for emulsion breakup in industry is to use chemical demulsifiers. The chemical demulsifiers...

Fall 2016

Suda, Justin P

“High-float” (HF) emulsions are dispersions of micron-sized bitumen droplets in water, with a special type of anionic surfactant functioning as stabilizer. By allowing the water to evaporate from an HF emulsion, what remains is called a “high-float emulsion residue.” Although indistinguishable in...

Fall 2015

Mortazavi Manesh, Sepideh

The rheological properties of heavy oil and bitumen depend on factors such as temperature, pressure, diluent type and diluent composition, as well as sample shear and thermal histories and shear conditions during measurements. Each of these factors can affect the value of apparent viscosity...

Fall 2023

Zhang, Hanyu

Non-aqueous extraction (NAE) process was explored as an alternative to the Clark hot water extraction process (CHWE) to recover bitumen from Alberta oil sands. The upshot of the NAE process is that it eliminates the latter’s environmental issues concerning high fresh water and energy...

Fall 2013

Wang, Lin

In industrial visbreaking processes, the conversion typically takes place at ~450 °C and the extent of conversion is limited by the coking propensity of the feed. Some of the older literature on bitumen upgrading reported that it was possible to substantially upgrade the straight run product at...

Spring 2010

Sadighian, Ardalan

The demand for accurate bitumen-pentane mass transfer data was the main motivation behind this research. Difficulties such as complex phase behavior, high viscosity and opacity of the hydrocarbon invariably lead to failure of conventional techniques to measure mass transfer coefficients...

Fall 2023

Dos Santos De Araujo, Filipe

Non-aqueous bitumen extraction processes (NAE) of mined oil sands ore have been investigated to circumvent the environmental and operating limitations of the current hot water-based technology. However, one primary challenge of NAE is a solvent recovery that meets environmental and economic...

Spring 2024

Malamace da Silva, Victor Hugo

The oil sands of Western Canada are among the most abundant and economically important unconventional petroleum resources. Hydrocarbon extraction from oil sands is conducted using warm water or in situ technologies that face considerable environmental challenges. Oil sands can also be valorized...

Fall 2016

Zhang, Ling

Asphaltenes are the heaviest component in crude oil and bitumen. The molecular interactions and interfacial behaviours of asphaltenes are closely related to many challenging issues in oil production, which are believed to play an important role in stabilizing water-in-oil (W/O) and oil-in-water...

Spring 2012

Junaid, Abu

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...