A novel approach to bitumen recovery from tar sands using sodium silicate solution and low-power ultrasound was successfully demonstrated (U.S. Patent 4,765,885; 4,891,131) in this laboratory. Elemental analysis indicated that the quality of the bitumen recovered was upgraded by this treatment (the hexane soluble fraction of the recovered bitumen was higher than the raw bitumen). The active compounds responsible for the enhanced oil recovery rate were identified as long-chain fatty acids by GC and FT-IR analyses. Further improvement of this novel approach is possible by introducing reagents that accelerate the degradation reaction of bitumen in the microenvironment of membrane mimetic agents (i.e., the surfactants formed by long-chain fatty acids and sodium silicates).
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Sadeghi et al. (1990) studied this question.
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