An engineer from the University of Calgary has described bitumen as resembling a liquid-filled headache capsule and, for an Alberta struggling to build pipelines, this tiny package could spell pain relief indeed.
Freshly patented and weeks away from pilot-scale production, the professor’s revolutionary heavy oil and bitumen pellets may finally provide a pipeline-free solution to getting Alberta’s largest oil reserves to market in a cheap, sustainable manner, while vastly reducing the environmental risk of transportation.
“There are only so many pipelines but there are rail tracks everywhere, and anywhere rail goes, so can these pellets,” explained Ian Gates, professor of chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering.
Balls of bitumen a happy accident
If it works as Gates and his team have demonstrated in the laboratory, the self-sealing balls of bitumen represent a game-changing breakthrough for an energy industry struggling to get its product to market. The pill-sized pellets, with their liquid core and super-viscous skin, vastly reduce the chance of a damaging spill or environmental accident – a fortuitous result, given that invention was the result of an accident in the laboratory.
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