Heightened oil sands extraction by pressure cycles

Hot water extraction of bitumen from oil sands has been commercially applied for decades. The extraction process is greatly aided by the addition of caustics and other reagents, which can adversely impact handling and disposal at process end. Recent attention has been on increasing process efficiency by reducing temperature, which might lead to longer conditioning time and additional chemical additives that require further treatment downstream. Utah oil sands with high bitumen viscosity are expected to require more intensive agitation and caustic wetting agent such as with sodium hydroxide. We have invented a new heightened oil sands extraction (HOSE) process that greatly accelerates release and collection of bitumen from oil sands, while requiring no intensive agitation, caustics, or other chemical additives that aggravate hydrocarbon contamination of process water and subsequent treatment and disposal needs. The technique involves compression and decompression cycles, delivering gas and oversaturating it in the sands/water mixture during compression; this creates expanding microbubbles during decompression that helps dislodge bitumen from the sands. The new process results in high yields without requiring chemical additives that are prone to creating problematic end products, thus it has potential in reducing environmental impacts from oil sands operation.