A great deal of effort has gone
into finding superior separation technologies for the tar sands over the past
fifty or more years. This appears to do
the trick if it stands up in scaling and it appears that it should.
This means that processing a
tarsand just became both cleaner, and hugely cheaper. The heating will be much less and the ability
to recover the active fluid is encouraging, although losses are still
inevitable.
I have to presume that the contained
natural ionic solids in the tarsands will accumulate over several cycles and
will need separation also tho8ugh that is not mentioned here.
Otherwise this is promising and
it will also be big news for the deposits in South America . Tarsand mining may well have just become
cheaper and easier.
New process cleanly extracts oil from tar sands and fouled beaches
(PhysOrg.com) -- A new, more environmentally friendly method of
separating oil from tar sands has been developed by a team of researchers at
Penn State. This method, which utilizes ionic liquids to separate the heavy
viscous oil from sand, also is capable of cleaning oil spills from beaches and
separating oil from drill cuttings, the solid particles that must be removed
from drilling fluids in oil and gas wells.
Tar sands, also known as bituminous sands or oil sands, represent
approximately two-thirds of the world’s estimated oil reserves. Canada is the
world’s major producer of unconventional petroleum from sands, and the U.S.
imports more than 1 million barrels of oil per day from Canada, about twice as
much as from Saudi Arabia. Much of this oil is produced from the Alberta
However, the production of petroleum from tar sands causes
environmental damage.
Part of the damage comes from
the storage of contaminated wastewater from the separation process in large
open air ponds. Wastewater from the ponds can seep into groundwater and pollute
lakes and rivers. In addition, the requirement for large amounts of water can
deplete the supply of local fresh water resources. The Penn State
Paul Painter, professor of polymer science in the Department of
Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State, and his group have spent
the past 18 months developing a technique that uses ionic liquids (salt in a
liquid state) to facilitate separation. The separation takes place at room
temperature without the generation of waste process water.
“Essentially, all of the bitumen is recovered in a very clean form,
without any contamination from the ionic liquids,” Painter explained. Because
the bitumen, solvents and sand/clay mixture separate into three distinct
phases, each can be removed separately and the solvent can be reused.
The process can also be used to extract oil and tar from beach sand
after oil spills, such as the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon incidents.
Unlike other methods of cleanup, the Penn
State
The researchers work with a group of ionic liquids based
on 1-alkyl-3-methylimidazolium cations, a positively charged material with high
chemical and thermal stability, a low degree of flammability, and almost
negligible vapor pressure, which makes recovering the ionic liquid relatively
simple. The team has built a functioning bench top model system and is in the
process of reducing their discovery to practice for patenting.
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