Grant: Alliance Grants

The oilsands industry has played significant role in economy of Alberta and Canada in the past decades. However, the oilsands industry has been criticized for its negative environmental impact. The industry has properly recognized the need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and has embarked on sustainable development of our natural resources by developing new in-situ recovery technologies to extract bitumen. Significant progress has been made in this direction and the industry has developed and tested solvent-aided bitumen recovery technologies that can potentially reduce its carbon footprint. Since 2008, in collaboration with the industry, we have developed a research program to advance the solvent-aided bitumen recovery science and engineering at the U of Calgary. This program has been instrumental in translating our results to field scale. The industry is at a critical stage of reducing GHG emissions by utilizing solvents. However, achieving this mission is not free of challenges and there exist significant knowledge gaps in important areas such as phase behaviour of multicomponent/bitumen solvents, solvent dissolution and exsolution, underlying mechanisms of asphaltene precipitation, laboratory evaluation of recovery processes, and developing methods for water cut measurement and solvent detection. The next phase of our collaborative program is designed to fill these knowledge gaps and help the industry advance solvent-aided technologies toward minimizing GHG emissions, unlock bitumen resources in thin and low-quality reservoirs, create more high-paying jobs, and improve the market competitiveness of the Canadian oilsands industry. The main benefits of advancement in solvent-aided technologies are decreased energy and water consumption and GHG emissions, which are in line with Canada's climate change mitigation strategies during the energy transition. The program will provide the opportunity to train strong team of researchers, including 6 MSc, 6 PhD, and 8 summer students, 3 PDFs/year, and one Research Associate capable of undertaking a broad range of advanced research endeavours related to oilsands industry.