Understanding the Properties and Interaction Mechanisms of SAGD Slop Oil towards the Development of An Effective Treatment Technology

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The proposed project focuses on an important issue in Canadian petroleum industry: characterizing the properties of slop oil from the steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) operation and developing a process joint with the oil sands industry to manage SAGD slop oil. Canada has the third largest oil reserves in the world, mainly in the form of oil sands. The in-situ SAGD operation has attracted much interest for Canadian oil sands industry, which opens up the potential to recover large reserves that cannot be accessed economically by traditional mining methods as well as significantly reduces the challenging environmental issues such as the accumulation of large volume of mature fine tailings. In the SAGD process, slop oil is generated through a variety of operations and emulsified with considerable amount of fine solids and water, which is not environmentally friendly and very difficult to manage. In this research, we propose to characterize the properties of SAGD slop oil and as well as the stabilization and destabilization mechanisms of slop oil emulsions, mainly by investigating the interfacial properties and interaction forces of slop oil emulsions with and without chemical additives. This work will improve the fundamental understanding of the physicochemical properties of slop oil and the stabilization/destabilization mechanisms of the slop oil emulsions with selected chemical additives, which is of great fundamental and practical importance and will facilitate the development of an effective approach of breaking the slop oil emulsions, Improved slop oil management can eliminate the environmental hazard and benefit the recovery of valuable oil products for the petroleum industry.