Oil Sand and Shale
The Bureau of Land Management predicts that there are an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil in the shale rock in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah areas. Canadian Oil Sands reserves rival those of the Middle East.
Current methods of processing oil from oil sands (using variations on ‘Fisher-Tropsch’ technology) have several economic and environmental limitations, i.e. they are energy intensive, use enormous volumes of water, extracts only 8% of the oil and leaves an oil/water/sand effluent that must be stored in enormous tailing ponds.
TiPs has been tested on oil sands and oil sands tailings and demonstrated the ability to completely (i.e. 99.9%) process the bitumen from the oil sands into a -32 deg. C pour point oil that did not require further upgrading. TiPs was also shown effective in completely processing tailing pond asphaltenes – something not yet demonstrated by other technologies. For example:
- Primary oil sands tested produced oil with a pour point of -32 deg C and yielded 12% oil by weight volume of input sand.
- Testing on oil sands tailing pond ashpaltenes showed complete liquefraction of the asphaltenes into sellable oil
- TiPs recovered 99.9% of the oil from Shale Rock taken from the DOE’s retort facility in Rifle, Colorado.