Analysis of Athabasca Bitumen and its Fractions using High Pressure Thermogravimetry – Evolved Gas Thermal Techniques

Date
2013-01-07
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Abstract
Exploitation of the reserves of an oil reservoir typically takes place in several stages. One of the secondary and tertiary techniques used to recover the remaining oil is In Situ Combustion. The process involves igniting the formation under constant injection of air and propagating a combustion front towards production wells. The heat and gases generated by the combustion process form an effective displacement mechanism. Before implementing such a technique, oil companies generally require evidence of the potential success of the process; this evidence is often based on laboratory investigations for tuning of the oxidation/combustion kinetics. Thermal Analysis techniques are often used to fingerprint the thermal behavior of crude oils. One of the advantages of these techniques is that they allow the isolation of different parameters in order to evaluate their effect on the thermal behavior of specific samples. Three different parameters were varied: operating pressure, heating rate and reaction gas were selected to evaluate their effect on the thermal behavior of Athabasca bitumen and its fractions. In this investigation a coupling of High Pressure TGA – Evolved Gas Analysis (EGA) techniques was used to aid in the interpretation of the distillation/cracking/oxidation and combustion behavior of whole bitumen and its maltenes and asphaltenes fractions. The thermal behavior has been analyzed in terms of three reaction regions; the Low Temperature Region (LTR), Negative Temperature Gradient Region (NTGR) and High Temperature Region (HTR).
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Engineering--Chemical
Citation
Martinez Correa, S. L. (2013). Analysis of Athabasca Bitumen and its Fractions using High Pressure Thermogravimetry – Evolved Gas Thermal Techniques (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/24817