into Oily Mud!

Making Oil Sand into Oily Mud! Real World Examples: Module 4

GRADE 8 | The Mix & Flow of Matter 1

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In this module...

GRADE 8 | The Mix & Flow of Matter

...we talked about the Mass, Volume and Density. Water is very useful in industry – it can be used to pull oil away from oil sand, or to transport suspensions over large distances. Ready to see what we mean?

Let’s get started!

What happens after oil sand is recovered? 3 1 2 4 5 6

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What happens after oil sand is recovered?

GRADE 8 | The Mix & Flow of Matter 3

Hydrotransporting the slurry to an extraction facility.

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Crushing the oil sand ore to reduce its size, and adding water to create a slurry.

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Using the crusher to break up the oil sands into smaller pieces and sending it to the Ore Preparation Plant.

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As we learned last time, oil sand is extracted by…

Transporting the loads to the crusher unit.

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Digging up the oil sand using large hydraulic power shovels and depositing it into heavy duty trucks.

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Hydrotransport

ore + water

Bitumen Froth

Tailings Tailings

Mining Ore Preparation

Extraction Froth Treatment


What happens next?

The heated slurry goes to a primary separation vessel at the extraction plant.

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LAST TIME

THIS TIME


Bitumen is too viscous to be transported, so it

must be dissolved or put into a froth first.

At this stage, air is introduced to allow for bitumen froth formation. This is particularly important in the next step of the extraction stage; the separation.

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Density in water is measure in kg/m3. That’s 1000 times

larger than densities measure in g/cm3.

In the plant, a cone-shaped vessel is used to separate the slurry into three distinct layers:

•  Bitumen froth (60%) •  Water (10%) •  Sand and clay (10%)

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Water

Sand

Bitumen froth


A thin layer of bitumen froth floats on the surface of the mixture because it is the least dense.

Middlings (a mixture that contains mostly water and some tailings) sit in the middle of the three layers.

The mineral solids (the tailings) aren’t soluble in water, so the sand and clay, which are the most dense, settle to the bottom of the vessel.

At this point, the density of the slurry is about 1500 kg/m3;

1.5 times as dense as water!

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9 GRADE 8 | The Mix & Flow of Matter

Once separated, the froth is then floated to the top of the separation vessel and moved to a centrifuge.

The bitumen froth has a density of about 0.6 g/cm3.

The water layer has a density of about 1.2 g/cm3.

The sand/clay layer has a density of about 1.9 g/cm3.

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Centrifuges!


This acts like a spinning amusement park ride, forcing the large parts (like sand and clay) to move to the sides so they can be separated.

Bitumen froth is skimmed off and spun in a centrifuge.

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Pipelines are used to pump the leftover sand, clay and water to large storage areas called tailings ponds.

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Athabasca Mine seen by a NASA satellite (July 2009)

Tailing pond water is reused in the process again and again.

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Next time...


We’ll look at Buoyancy as it relates to the oil sands! We’ll find out how dense bitumen really is, and how buoyancy can be used to purify bitumen.

See you then!

What happens after oil sand is recovered? 3 1 2 4 5 6

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into Oily Mud!

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