SBIR Phase I: Laser activated viscosity reduction and upgrading of bitumen for transportation to refineries

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a revolutionary new technology for upgrading and reducing the viscosity of bitumen, an oil sands feedstock. Bitumen is a major source of heavy crude oil for the US, but has 10,000-100,000 times higher viscosity than traditional crude, requiring producers to decrease its viscosity prior to transport to refineries, using highly volatile and costly additives (diluents). This requirement adds $9-14 of cost per barrel and consumes valuable transport capacity (the diluent occupies a third of a barrel of raw bitumen), intensifying the need for additional rail/pipeline transport capacity. This Phase I project will develop fundamental knowledge about a new, patent-pending, laser-based process that has recently demonstrated significant reduction in bitumen viscosity without the use of diluent or other chemicals. This effort constitutes a critical step in commercializing the process and realizing turnkey equipment for use by bitumen producers in Canada and beyond. It is estimated that processing 100,000 barrels/day (BPD) via this process could save producers approximately $400 million annually. If implemented, this process would also drastically decrease the environmental risk associated with diluent transport. The intellectual merit of this project lies in the photo-activated disintegration of chemical bonds using a nonlinear optical, multiphoton absorption process, coupled with fluid rheology control in viscoelastic fluid. The photonic technology in this project utilizes the absolute minimum energy necessary to selectively crack large hydrocarbon molecules into smaller molecules and requires no chemical additives. In laboratory-scale research, this process has successfully reduced the viscosity of raw bitumen by three orders of magnitude and enhanced the American Petroleum Institute (API) gravity, taking the feedstock from an immobile complex molecular ensemble to an upgraded, free-flowing fluidic state. The nonlinear optical process provides enhanced optical absorption in the material, thus resulting in better energy utilization for the chemical bond breaking process and associated viscosity change, in comparison to thermal visbreaking, the current industry-standard process. This Phase I project will develop fundamental understanding of the experimental parameters (such as wavelength, irradiance and exposure time of optical radiation) necessary to maximize the basic cracking process efficiency and to control the aklyation, aromaticity and polymerization processes needed to premium-quality petroleum products. In turn, the fundamental knowledge acquired will guide the future development of commercial-scale equipment with this process.