SGS Pilot Capabilities

CAPABILITIES OF THE SGS APPLIED RESEARCH AND TRAINING FACILITY

SGS is dedicated to providing you with practical technical solutions that optimize your operations, reduce your risk, and maximize return. Our Applied Research and Training Facility houses a 2 tonne per hour pilot plant (nominal) that allows us to address many technical questions.  SGS is well positioned to be a single source provider to the oil sands industry: our solutions address many operational challenges in the oil sands industry including extraction, froth treatment and tailing testing.  

Extraction Process

The pilot plant equipment in the Facility is designed to be semi modular and so is skid-mounted. This configuration means we can test a variety of alternative flowsheet, and, we can configure your plant quickly in a “plug and play” manner.

The pilot plant has been equipped with a range of equipment, including:

• Primary separation vessel (PSV).
• Hydrocyclone (primary and others).
• Mechanical flotation cells.
• Flotation columns.
• Contact columns.
• Belt filter.
• Thickeners.

The SGS pilot plant equipment is available in a range of sizes and capacities sizes to permit a variety of different flowsheet configurations. Within a single pilot plant campaign, we can test several different flowsheet configurations (for example, a comparison of mechanical cells versus column cells).

Froth Treatment

Froth treatment is a critical step in the overall bitumen production process. As such, the design of this represents an area of considerable technical risk. The SGS froth treatment plant has been designed to handle 400 kg/hr of froth. Our froth treatment plant operates on a continuous basis to service your needs.

The froth treatment plant has tankage for feed slurry, dilute bitumen, solvents, stripped tails and slops. This ensures that the various waste procedures are segregated. This makes it easier to manage product disposal. The froth treatment plant is located in a separate, well ventilated building, independent of the primary extraction pilot plant facility.

Tailings Testing

Understanding the changes in the physical and chemical balance allow us to address any potential hazards. As part of a piloting exercise, tailings are produced and we characterize them for their chemical and physical characteristics. Such assessments can be performed on process waters or solids waste. Tailings are filtered and then chemically treated. Solids go for tailings testing while liquids are recycled back as process water.

SGS offers a large-scale geotechnical batch tests to study tailings characteristics including:

• Settling.
• Compaction.
• Rheology.
• Porosity.  
• Clarity.
• Chemical and bituminous aspects of tailings.

Facility Description

Ore Storage

• 11,000 ft2 of refrigerated storage area
• 2,500 tonnes of ore storage capacity
• Multiple ore types are stored in segregated bins

Water-Based Extraction

• 2 tonne per hour oil sand feed rate (nominal)
• 12,500 ft2 enclosed year-round facility
• Modular plug-and-play configuration to allow easy movement of skid mounted process equipment (process skids).
• Any process flowsheet can be reproduced with existing inventory of unit operations or the addition of client-designed process skids
• Fully instrumented, state-of-the-art ABB distributed control system (DCS) for process control and data acquisition

Froth Treatment, Solvent Processes, and Upgrading

• 5,000 ft2 enclosed year-round facility expandable to 7,500 ft2 and, with addition of a partition, allows two clients to operate separately and in complete privacy
• One tank farm (expandable to two) to support two clients running concurrently
• Class 1 Zone 2 ignition electrical process equipment classification
• Modular plug-and-play configuration allowing process skids to be moved easily
• Currently configured for paraffinic froth treatment but can be modified for naphthenic treatment
• Area classification and our building infrastructure support the testing of primary upgrading processes such as (delayed coking, visbreaking, solvent deasphalting, hydroconversion, etc., process skids would be designed with client or received “as is” and plugged into building infrastructure.

Staff

• Stable workforce of professional operators, engineers, and tradesmen.
• Experienced workforce means that the “learning curve” for new processes is greatly minimized
• Infrastructure and existing unit operations are de-bugged by our staff so the commissioning phase for new projects is very short. This means shorter, less expensive pilot programs that cost less and provide better data.
• Our staff adds value to our clients by offering opinions, based on long experience, throughout all of the program stages (process design, operations, data analysis, and report writing).
• Our technical expertise means that we can address unforeseen problems that arise during the pilot plant stage.