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Show " Tar sands process n boosts recovery percent Canadian experts have been in-. in-. st:2atir.g extracting oil from tar " a.'xis or more than 60 years and now, -t-w& the best known methods, they . 2n recover about 85 percent of the oil. f ; But. in light of a new method that has . lea studied at the University of Utah Research Institute. Dr. Guy B. .Alexander, project director of Energy fteources. says you can boost that ?Je to 97 or 98 percent. ,1 Which means the well-known ''Tocesses waste some 15 percent of the ' itumen which amounts to $200,000 a Vfey or $73 million a year, he notes. Dr. Alexander has been studying a .atalytic cohesion process at the , ' fq-Jest of Prota Plants Inc., a ,1'Tivately owned firm with offices in 1!t Lake City, Provo and Edmonton, Uberta, Canada. Dr. Alexander notes there are .ssentially three different processes to C ver the oil, or bitumen, from tar Vj'nds: a chemical process using a Vaustic agent, use of solvent such - (is gasoline or naphtha to remove it, or sweating the sand. ;- Alexander notes that in Canada ;'ome 01 the major tar sands recovery plants operated by Syncrude or Syncor have a capacity of 2O0. 000 barrels of oil a day. They use the chemical process typically, he said. He notes that byproducts of the process result in tailing dumps that look "like malted milk, only they stink" because of sulfer content. He said that the catalytic cohesive process he won't be more specific since the process is being patented w ith a recovery rate of 96 to 98 percent would make quite a difference in the efficiency of the plants. "What we did for Porta Plants is to develop a catalytic surface that will pull out the oil. We start with the sand, and water like others, but we have developed a neat way of harvesting the material," he said, by modifying the chemical process. The University of Utah Research Institute is a private, non-profit organization and is independent from the Univeristy. Dr. Alexander said the process has been tested on Alberta tar sands and Utah tar sands as well. He. savs in a report to the firrrt that (continued on Page 3) Tar sands (continued from Page 1) the process should be checked further and a patent obtained. "It is Univeristy of Utah Research Institute's opinion that the process is novel, patentable and commercially attractive," he said. The process will not be streamlined, he said, and a 50 barrel-a-day test plant used to check it further. "Then the firm will build a 25,000 barrcl-a-day plant, probably at Asphalt Ridge near Vernal and then they will probably try to sell the process to the Canadians," he said. He said it will probably be 1986 or so before increased production will be realized. "From an economic point of view, they have a winner. There are significant savings over many other processes. I would be surprized if this process wasn't at the top in terms of economics," he said. Utah, he noted, has some 90 to 95 percent of the tar sand deposits in the country. Lena Ross, Porta Plants president, said the firm was formed by her to further tar sand development. She said she had been in oil field development since 1947. It was then, she claims, she found the process to separate the tar from sands. She said she has spent some $440,000 on the idea and in developing the process. She came to Utah in 1980 and then asked the UURI to check the process. The process developed for her firm, she said, will make tar sands economically viable. Negotiations are under way for the pilot plant, she said. |