Drainage of Oil Sand and its Oil Recovery

Pumping Oil Sand Froth

Froth is the basis to the extraction of bitumen from oil sand. Its components include sand, bitumen, water, and air. The technology of extraction and processing is evolving toward lower temperature of operation where the volumetric content of air and viscosity of bitumen challenge pumping. To improve the efficiency of froth handling pumps it is important to adapt the technology from other indus...

Wettability and Its Effect on Oil Recovery

Reservoir wettability is determined by complex interface boundary conditions acting within the pore space of sedimentary rocks. These conditions have a dominant effect on interface movement and associated oil displacement. Wettability is a significant issue in multiphase flow problems ranging from oil migration from source rocks to such enhanced recovery processes as alkaline flooding or altern...

Neural Network Meta-Modeling of Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage Oil Recovery Processes

Production of highly viscous tar sand bitumen using Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) with a pair of horizontal wells has advantages over conventional steam flooding. This paper explores the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) as an alternative to the traditional SAGD simulation approach. Feed forward, multi-layered neural network meta-models are trained through the Back-...

Separation of oil and water in oil spill recovery operations *

The separation of water from oil that is collected in any oil spill recovery operation is a continuing and necessary requirement during every stage of the effort. Its importance is reflected in the cost of transport and storage of large volumes of oily water, the salvage value of separated oil and the added labor costs associated with long-term recovery operations. This paper addresses the effe...

Heavy Oil and Tar Sand Bitumen