Vapor–Liquid Equilibrium of Bitumen–Ethane Mixtures for Three Athabasca Bitumen Samples

Steam–solvent coinjection processes have received more attention in the past decade due to the environmental impact of the pure steam injection process. Increasingly restrictive environmental regulations including carbon tax have served to push the industry to consider coinjection processes (steam + solvent) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Understanding the phase behavior of solvent/bitumen mixtures is critical for feasibility studies as well as the design and implementation of a successful coinjection process. This study presents the vapor–liquid equilibria for bitumen/ethane mixtures and their applications for bitumen recovery processes. Experiments were conducted for temperatures up to 190 °C and pressures up to 10 MPa to simulate the conditions of in situ steam processes. The results of our vapor–liquid equilibrium experiments include solubility, viscosity, and density measurements of the saturated liquid phase, k-values, and gas oil ratio. Increasing the temperature from 50 to 150 °C resulted in ...