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Spring 2019

Dwaik, Carol G

Stabilization of water-in-oil droplets during bitumen extraction and refining process poses a major challenge in the oil sands industry. These crude oil emulsions are stabilized by rigid films at water droplet-oil interfaces. The salty water remaining in oil causes equipment corrosion, catalyst...

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 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...

Fall 2015

Rocha Aguilera, Gonzalo

As demand for fuel increases, new technologies that can convert heavy oil and bitumen into light fuels are needed. Natural zeolites have been proven to catalyze reactions that decrease molecular weight, density, nitrogen, and metals content as well as vacuum residue content when mixed with raw...

Fall 2017

Chen, Qiang

The intimate association between bitumen components and clay minerals is an important feature of oil sands fine solids. These organically-modified clay minerals cause serious problems in Canadian oil sands production: hindering bitumen extraction, stabilizing water-in-bitumen emulsions, fouling...

Spring 2019

Baker, Kathleen E.N.

My research was motivated by a fatality that occurred at an oil sands tailings operation on January 19, 2014, when a worker drowned in an underground cavern which formed under a leaking tailings transport system. At the time of the incident, the organization and workers did not know that ground...

Spring 2016

Panda,Siddhant

Non-aqueous extraction technologies are currently being investigated as an alternative to the conventional water based process for extracting bitumen from oil sands. The reduced dependence on fresh water and land for creation of tailing ponds makes non-aqueous technologies a greener alternative....

Spring 2010

Gao, Song

There are several technical challenges in large scale heavy oil processing. In the oil sand industry, for example, the existence of water-in-oil emulsion in diluted bitumen produced from froth treatment presents a great challenge to the industry. In this work, the effect of different bitumen...

Spring 2014

Teklebrhan, Robel Berhe

The detection, identification and characterization of early stage molecular association of polyaromatic molecules into nanoaggregates, where these nanoaggregates represent the first level of molecular clusters or building blocks are critical in areas such as design and fabrication of advanced 3-D...

Spring 2022

Bhargava, Aakanksha

Naphthenic Froth Treatment (NFT) is employed to remove water droplets and solids from the bitumen froth recovered from the extracted oilsands ore. In the process, bitumen froth is diluted with naphtha to reduce the viscosity and induce density difference to promote settling of water droplets and...