New oil sand extraction technology

The new, more environmentally friendly method will extract oil from oil sands that has been developed by researchers at Penn State University (USA).

They use ionic liquids to separate high viscosity oils from sand and clean up oil spills on beaches and extract oil from crumbs after drilling.

Oil sand is known as asphalt sand. It accounts for nearly two-thirds of the world's oil reserves. Canada is the largest producer of oil from sand today.

Oil sand

Researchers took 18 months to develop a technique to use ionic liquids to support oil separation. The separation process takes place at room temperature without creating waste water.

However, oil production from oil sands affects the environment. Polluted wastewater will be retained in large tanks. and it will seep into groundwater causing pollution of rivers and lakes.

In addition, it also needs a large volume of water so the local freshwater supply is at risk of being depleted.

Researchers' new separation method will use very little energy and water.

The entire bitumen is recovered in a very clean form without causing any pollution due to ionic liquids.

This process can be used to extract oil and asphalt from sand on the beach after oil spills such as the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon incidents.

Unlike other cleaning methods, the new process completely removes cleanly treated hydrogen carbon and sand that is returned to the beach instead of being taken to landfills.

Oil sand is naturally present in the mixture of sand or clay, water and is a form of petroleum with a very high viscosity and density. They are found in large reserves in some countries around the world, of which the largest reserves are found in Canada and Venezuela.

Oil sand reserves have only been considered a part of the world oil reserves in recent years, when oil prices are high and new technologies that allow exploitation of these products can be profitable. Oils that are generally considered non-traditional or crude bitumen, are also intended to distinguish the bitumen extracted from other hydrocarbon mixtures such as crude oil.

To produce liquid fuels from oil sands requires more energy to pump than water to enter and distill. This process generates 2 to 4 times more greenhouse gases per barrel of oil than is produced from traditional oil products. Burning the final product from sand oil production produces 10 to 45 percent of greenhouse gas compared to traditional crude oil. (According to Wikipedia)