Technology
The joint venture uses closed-loop solvent extraction process originally proven by X-TRAC Energy in Wyoming in 1998, with a full scale production plant. Black Sands Energy has exclusive rights to a technology.
The above-ground extraction process dissolute crushed, 1" minus oil sands materials through contact with a benign non-toxic solvent in an enclosed extractor vessel at temperatures up to 300 °F (149 °C) at near-atmospheric pressures. As the material dissolves, it is passed to a wash chamber where any remaining oil is removed. The oil-free sand is then desolventized with heat, which converts the liquid solvent to a gas, leaving dry solids suitable for mine backfill. The solvent-oil mixture is pumped into a critical unit for the removal of asphalt and oil from the solvent through heating and cooling. The recovered solvent is compressed back to a liquid, cooled and re-circulated to the extractor vessel in an endless loop. The system consists of only few moving parts and it operates on a gravity principle. Since the process does not use water to recover the oil, energy requirements are minimal.
Read more about this topic: Utah Oil Sands Joint Venture
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)
“Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power ... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)