Migration of Fine Solids into Product Bitumen from Solvent Extraction of Alberta Oilsands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The extraction of bitumen from the oilsands using solvents has the potential to avoid the environmental problems with wet tailings associated with water-based extraction technology. One of the key performance parameters for this technology is the concentration of fine solids in the recovered bitumen. In this study, the concentration and properties of the fine solids in cyclohexane-extracted bitumen were examined as a function of the water content of the ore. Total water contents from 3.4–13.4 wt % gave the lowest concentrations of fine solids in the bitumen, ca. 0.2 wt % of the initial mass of a low-fines content ore. Higher fine solids contents in the bitumen were observed with water concentrations outside this range and with higher concentrations of fine solids in the initial oilsands ore. The fine solids exhibited a distribution of surface properties, and the most hydrophobic, carbon rich solids were carried into the bitumen even under the most favorable conditions. When the bitumen was more contaminated with fine solids, due to higher fines in the ore or lack of water to bind the fines to the sand, the carbon content of the fine solids decreased. The majority of the carbon in the fine solids was organic material due to bitumen and surface adsorbed components. Despite carbon contents over 20 wt %, XPS analysis showed significant surface silicon and aluminum, and contact angles were in the range of 80–88°, consistent with partial organic coating of the mineral particles. Characterization of the fine solids by SEM, particle size, and mineralogy suggested that the migration of the fine solids into the bitumen, versus remaining with the coarse sand, was significantly affected by the organic surface deposits on the particles.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".