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

拟议的项目关注加拿大石油行业的一个重要问题：表征蒸汽辅助重力排水(SAGD)作业产生的污油的性质，并与油砂行业开发一种联合工艺来管理SAGD污油。加拿大拥有世界第三大石油储量，主要以油砂的形式存在。原地SAGD作业引起了加拿大油砂行业的极大兴趣，它为回收传统采矿方法无法经济获得的大量储量提供了潜力，并显著减少了大量成熟细粒尾矿堆积等具有挑战性的环境问题。在SAGD工艺中，污油是通过各种操作产生的，并与大量的细固体和水乳化，这对环境不友好，管理非常困难。在这项研究中，我们主要通过考察加入和不加入化学添加剂的污水乳状液的界面性质和相互作用力，来表征SAGD污水油的性质，以及污水乳化的稳定和失稳机理。这项工作将加深对污水油的物理化学性质和含选定化学添加剂的污水乳状液的稳定/失稳机理的基本认识，具有重要的基础和实际意义，并将有助于开发一种有效的破除污水乳状液的方法，改进污水油管理可以消除环境危害，有利于石油工业有价值的石油产品的回收。

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.