Nanoparticle technology for heavy oil in-situ upgrading and recovery enhancement: Opportunities and challenges

With more than 170 billion barrels of estimated oil sands reserves in Canada, Canada has the third largest oil reserves in the world. However, more than 80% of oil sand’s reserves are located deep underground and could not be accessed by surface mining. Nonetheless, a number of in-situ recovery methods have been developed to extract heavy oil and bitumen from deep reservoirs. Once produced, bitumen is transferred to upgraders converting low quality oil to synthetic crude oil. However, in the present context, heavy oil and bitumen exploitation process is not just high-energy and water intensive, but also it has significant environmental footprints as it produces significant amount of gaseous emissions and wastewater. In addition, the level of contaminants in bitumen requires special equipment, and has also environmental repercussions.