The solvent extraction is a potential choice to recover asphalt from unconventional oil ores

Abstract

The abundant unconventional oil ores (about 70% of total world oil) are playing an increasingly important role in global energy supply. To obtain asphalt in unconventional oil ores, different methods, including hot water-based extraction, pyrolysis and solvent extraction, were used to recover asphalt from oil ores (i.e., Canadian, Indonesian, and Iranian oil ores). It is found that asphalt recovery obtained by solvent extraction is the highest. Multi-staged single solvent extraction was used to recover asphalt from oil ores (i.e., toluene, tetrahydrofuran: THF, xylene, petroleum: PE, ethanol), resulting in a cumulative asphalt recovery over 98% at ambient conditions by using toluene. Take Iranian oil ores with the highest oil content (83.79 wt%) as an example, great asphalt recovery was obtained by using multi-staged composite solvents extraction (i.e., toluene@xylene, toluene@THF, toluene@PE, toluene@ethanol). It is also found that introduction of toluene in the composite solvents can significantly increase the ability of single solvent’s (xylene, THF, PE and ethanol) asphalt recovery. After solvent extraction, the solvent recovery was more than 95%. This finds suggest that solvent extraction method would be potential choice to recover asphalt from unconventional oil ores, and it possesses great prospect of industrial application in the future.