Fractal is investing in new ideas and concepts within the areas of expertise: processing/upgrading heavy-oil and bitumen, by applying simple, proprietary technology. This work focuses on the following areas:

• Continuous improvement of nozzle performance.
• Heavy oil decontamination: TAN, asphalt and sulfur removal.
• Hydrogen addition/diluent replacement (100%)
• Emulsion breaking
• Engineering: producer facility integration, lower capex intensity

Near term activities are focused on nozzle improvement and engineering, however effort is also going into heavy oil decontamination.

The Jetshear™ process considerably changes the nature of the associative and cohesive forces among constitutive components.

Under such conditions asphaltenes (modified by the loss of lateral chains and removal of functionalities) and specific fractions of the resins (modified in its functionalities) can be separated out by solvent deasphalting and/or microfiltration. Solvent deasphalting preceeded by a JetShear™ treatment uses only a fraction of the solvent required by the conventional high solvent ratio deasphalting processes.

Additionally, Fractal is developing a proprietary filtration process to remove asphaltenes which is placed after its Jetshear™ nozzle. The technology integrates techniques used in different industries and adapts them for bitumen and heavy oil feedstocks. It requires further optimization before ‘piloting’. The targeted objective is an upgrade of 8-10 API and full diluent displacement, with additional decontamination via reduction of sulphur and metals that are binded to the asphaltenes. The aphaltenes by-product could be used on site for steam production or further upgraded through gasification or pyrolysis. Systems can be manufactured with or without a back-end asphaltenes removal system.