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Skip to Search Results- 5Xu, Zhenghe (Chemical and Materials Engineering)
- 3De Klerk, Arno (Chemical and Materials Engineering)
- 2Kuznicki, Steve (Chemical and Materials Engineering)
- 2Liu, Qi (Chemical and Materials Engineering)
- 2Liu, Qingxia (Chemical and Materials Engineering)
- 2McCaffrey, William (Chemical and Materials Engineering)
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Spring 2017
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...
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Spring 2010
Canada has the largest known reserve of oil in the world in the form of oil sands: an estimated 1.7 to 2.5 trillion barrels of oil are deposited in combination of the sand, water and clay. The presented research is devoted to bubble-solid surface interaction, which is one of the critical areas...
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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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Colloid Science of Sand Remediation: A Study Motivated by the Non-Aqueous Extraction of Bitumen from Oil Sands
DownloadFall 2014
The current water-based method of bitumen extraction requires withdrawal of fresh water from the Athabasca River — a practice which leads to the continual buildup of tailings ponds and other environmental concerns. As Alberta’s bitumen production is expected to more than double by 2020, there is...
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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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Study of biodiesel-assisted ambient aqueous bitumen extraction (BA3BE) for hydrocarbon production from mineable oil sands
DownloadFall 2019
Surface mining followed by Clark’s hot water bitumen extraction (HWBE) process has been employed in the current mineable oil sands industry for massive bitumen production. This method is faced with numerous challenges such as high energy consumption, limited bitumen quality, production from...
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Fall 2009
The extraction of bitumen (heavy oil) from the oil sands is predominantly achieved through a water-based technology. This involves a slurrying process, typically called conditioning, which is categorized into three equally important steps: bitumen-sand liberation, bitumen coalescence, and...
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Understanding the Role of Caustic Addition: A Comparison of Sodium Hydroxide and Ammonium Hydroxide
DownloadSpring 2012
To understand the role of caustic addition and its effect on the bitumen extraction process, a novel flow cell and a Denver Cell extraction unit were utilized. This allowed for the comparison of sodium hydroxide and ammonium hydroxides effect on real oil sands ores. Several ores (A1, C-ore,...
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Fall 2013
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...
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Spring 2014
Seven Ni-WC tubular wires utilized in this study were characterized by the nickel sheath area, powder composition, and overall initial carbide volume fraction of the wire prior to welding. The electrical resistivity of steel, stainless steel, and Ni-WC welding consumables were measured from...