The Process

How hard can it be to get the oil out of the oil sands? After all, on a hot day, the stuff oozes out of the river banks! Even though it seems like it should be, the process of transforming raw oil sands

in to valuable products is not a simple matter. It took the combined efforts of many people, over a period of many years, to come up with a reliable, widely useable way to do it.

Several methods were investigated, championed by a variety of institutions, businesses and individuals.* Among these, three were the most prominent and productive. The federal Bureau of Mines concentrated on a cold water flotation method that used petroleum distillate or diluents to facilitate separation. The National Research Council, meanwhile, worked on a fluidized bed technique, to distil oil directly from the sand. The Research Council of Alberta, under the direction of Karl Clark, pursued a hot water separation method. In the end, it was Clark’s method that was developed to the point of an industrial trial.

Bitumount was the ideal spot for this trial. The sand is just below the surface of the

land and has a composition that poses fewer technical problems than other deposits. During the early years of oil sands development, these conditions made it deceptively easy for Robert Fitzsimmons to succeed in separating the oil sands. While people working at other locations ran into a variety of challenges, Fitzsimmons was able to get bitumen out of the sand and into a storage tank using a rather primitive set-up. Eventually, the hard-won knowledge of the scientists and engineers and the favourable conditions at Bitumount came together, resulting in a working model of a commercial oil sands plant.

There are three basic steps in the process used at Bitumount: 1) Mining;
2) Separating; 3) Upgrading.