Destabilization and interaction mechanisms of emulsions in oil sands production

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The proposed project focuses on a challenging issue confronting the Canadian and global petroleum industry: destabilization of emulsions and the associated interaction mechanisms in oil production processes, particularly in the Canadian oil sands production. Canada has the third largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Surface mining and in situ extraction techniques such as steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) have been widely used by oil industry for bitumen extraction. Warm water and high pressure steam are used in surface mining and SAGD operations, respectively, to extract the bitumen from the oil sands deposits. Water-in-oil (W/O), oil-in-water (O/W) or even more complex emulsions are formed in these water/steam-assisted operations. The stable emulsions are highly undesired because they can cause serious technical challenges and significantly increase the operating cost in oil production. In this research, we propose to characterize the oil/water interfacial properties under the environmental conditions of surface mining and SAGD operations in oil sands production, evaluate the demulsification and oil/water separation performance of emulsions using commercial emulsion breakers (EB) and reverse emulsion breakers (REB), elucidate the interaction mechanisms that contribute to the stabilization and destabilization of emulsions, and develop more effective chemical reagents based on the fundamental interaction principles discovered. It is expected that the proposed research will provide effective solutions (e.g., effective chemical reagent products and novel demulsification technologies) to the oil industry on the challenging emulsion issues. The fundamental intermolecular and surface interaction mechanisms to be elucidated will help the industry sponsor and oil sands industry further develop more effective and economical approaches to destabilize and remove the undesired emulsions in the related processes of oil sands production, eliminating the associated challenging problems (e.g., fouling and corrosion) and lowering the operating cost.