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Understanding Water‐Based Bitumen Extraction from Athabasca Oil Sands
Author(s) -
Masliyah Jacob,
Zhou Zhiang Joe,
Xu Zhenghe,
Czarnecki Jan,
Hamza Hassan
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
the canadian journal of chemical engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.404
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1939-019X
pISSN - 0008-4034
DOI - 10.1002/cjce.5450820403
Subject(s) - oil sands , asphalt , extraction (chemistry) , slurry , environmental science , aeration , solvent extraction , petroleum engineering , waste management , geology , engineering , materials science , chemistry , environmental engineering , chromatography , composite material
The current state of knowledge on the fundamentals of bitumen recovery from Athabasca oil sands using water‐based extraction methods is reviewed. Instead of investigating bitumen extraction as a black box, the bitumen extraction process has been discussed and analyzed as individual steps: Oil sand lump size reduction, bitumen liberation, aeration, flotation and interactions among the different components that make up an oil sand slurry. With the development and adoption of advanced analytical instrumentations, our understanding of bitumen extraction at each individual step has been extended from the macroscopic scale down to the molecular level. How to improve bitumen recovery and bitumen froth quality from poor processing ores is still a future challenge in oil sands processing.