Bitumen and Its Recovery Techniques

This chapter reports the formation, composition, ex-situ and in-situ techniques for extracting bitumen and heavy oil from oil sands. Peak oil theory proposes that conventional light crude oil reserves have reached their peak and are declining. To meet the rising demand for fuel, the oil industry has focused on vast deposits of heavy crude and bitumen around the world. Due to the difficulty associated with heavy oil and bitumen, they are underutilized energy resources. Both are priced low at the market due to their immobility at reservoir conditions, high sulfur and metal contents, and low API (American Petroleum Institute) gravity, which make them cost intensive to recover, transport and refine. Hence, depending on the reservoir depth, bitumen can be recovered through surface mining or enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques generally grouped into thermal and non-thermal methods. Herein, surface mining and the various EOR techniques are presented and evaluated on their applicability and limitations for bitumen and heavy oil recovery, and have been compared with the newly proposed novel Toe-to-Heel Air Injection (THAI) process, and its add-on Catalytic Upgrading Process Insitu (CAPRI). The chapter highlights potential areas for further investigations while proposing novel techniques to concurrently recover and upgrade bitumen. A combination of recovery and in-situ upgrading processes for bitumen/heavy oil offers both economic and environmental advantages over a series of recovery, and then, surface upgrading procedures.