Premium
Application of microbial enhanced oil recovery technology in water‐based bitumen extraction from weathered oil sands
Author(s) -
Ding Mingshan,
Zhang Yan,
Liu Juan,
Jia Weihong,
Hu Bin,
Ren Sili
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
aiche journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 167
eISSN - 1547-5905
pISSN - 0001-1541
DOI - 10.1002/aic.14483
Subject(s) - oil sands , asphalt , asphaltene , wetting , extraction (chemistry) , petroleum engineering , environmental science , geology , materials science , chemistry , chemical engineering , engineering , composite material , chromatography
When using the water‐based extraction processes (WBEPs) to recover bitumen from the weathered oil sands, very low bitumen recovery arisen from the poor liberation of bitumen from sand grains is always obtained. Application of microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) technology in WBEPs to solve the poor processability of the weathered ore was proposed. It was found that processability of the microbial‐treated weathered ore was greatly improved. The improved processability was attributed to the biosurfactants production in the culture solution, alteration of the solids wettability, degradation of the asphaltene component, and the decrease of the bitumen viscosity, which collectively contributed to the bitumen liberation from the surface of sand grains. Although it still has many issues to be solved for an industrial application of the MEOR technology in oil sands separation, it is believed that the findings in this work promote the solution to the poor processability of the weathered ore. © 2014 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J , 60: 2985–2993, 2014