Then why not haul it in side dump gondolas instead of tank cars? According to Fred Frailey's excellent article in this month's Trains, adding dilbit at the source (Alberta) and then removing the dilbit on the refinery (Louisiana/Texas) end is a cumbersome, wasteful, and costly process for both pipeline and rail transportation.
"Consumer" bitumen (the stuff the paving companies use) gets hauled in heater-equipped cars - a possibility I believe Fred mentioned. I think the problem is the lack of same.
I've never seen "raw" bitumen, so I don't know if it would be conducive to hauling in a side-dump gon. It could be that while it's too thick to run through a pipe, it might be too oozy to load in an open car that most certainly leaks.
As a side note, those fellows who haul asphalt from the plant to the paving site coat the boxes of their dump truck before the asphalt is put in. I think they use naphtha, but don't quote me on that. I know of one driver who neglected to do so and ended up shoveling his load off. Could not have been fun.
That means that even if it were possible to haul the bitumen in a gon, you still have to introduce another substance into the overall mix to make things work right.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
Ulrich,
I suggested a concept for hauling bitumen in open top cars and dumping with a rotary dumper on Fred's blog site, but I was told it would not work. What a surprise.
I speculate that bitumen could be shipped by rail in a totally undiluted form in open top cars rather than in tank cars. The cars could be smooth inside with rounded corners and a fair amount of draft taper. Then for unloading, the car could be rotary dumped.
The open top car I mention could have a hinged cover to keep contaminants out. The car would not take an excess amount of time to dump. Once inverted, the contents would release and drop within seconds.
The key to dumping would be to use a release liner made of something like 20 mil HDPE. The liner would be seamless and made to fit the car cavity. It would be installed with an inserter machine prior to loading. Then when the car is inverted for dumping, the film would promote a 100% free release of the bitumen. The film liner would be discharged with the bitumen and be burned up in the processing. Very little, if any, interior cleaning of the car would ever be needed.
It seems like a real hardship to put bitumen in tank cars and then have to steam heat it to get it to flow out through a pipe. And even then, the process still requires thinning with the use of, and handling of diluent, although it does require less diluent than the pipeline option.
What I am suggesting eliminates the use of diluent. So it offers four advantages over the tank car handling method:
1) Eliminates the need to thin the bitumen with diluent.
2) Eliminates the thermal energy needed to heat the bitumen for unloading.
3) Dramatically speeds up the unloading process by eliminating the time for heating.
4) Eliminates the need to clean the car interior.
Therefore, if the process I am suggesting were perfected, it would offer rail shipment of bitumen an enormous advantage over the tank car method; and quite likely a large advantage over the pipeline method.
There's probably something we're not understanding. As Trees noted above, it may be that the stuff would get stuck in the gondolas unless the gondolas are somehow treated beforehand, and then we're back to square one. I will say though, that from a publicity standpoint the side dumps would be an easier sell than running tank cars through towns. No one would expect side dumps to explode even if they did derail.
Maybe load the stuff on flatcars, and when the train arrives at the refinery it slowly pulls under a large scraper that plows the stuff off. There's a problem for the engineers out there.
I am not proposing the use of gondolas or any currently existing rolling stock. This would require a new open top car that has a smooth interior with rounded corners and a taper-- all sort of like the interior geometry of a bathtub. The point would be to encourage the bitumen to release from the car when it is inverted. Technically, you would say that the car interior sides would have draft taper.
I assume that during winter, the bitumen would be as solid as concrete. I am not sure about how viscous it would be during summer, but I assume it would still be relatively solid. The polyethylene film liner that I mentioned above would prevent the bitumen from sticking to the car interior which could happen despite the draft taper if the material was loaded warm and then froze.
So if this sh...tuff is that solid, we'd have to assume that when it's dumped, either by a side dump or a rotary-dump gon, it's going to come out as pretty much a large blob.Then what?
How does one move it from where it was dumped to make room for the next carload? A conveyor belt that occasionally gets a multi-ton blob to drop somewhere? Loaders and air hammers? You might have to devise a way to warm it up in order to loosen it up. And if that's the case, I'd rather expend a little bit of energy on a closed steam system in a confined area than try to heat something in the open.
Carl
Railroader Emeritus (practiced railroading for 46 years--and in 2010 I finally got it right!)
CAACSCOCOM--I don't want to behave improperly, so I just won't behave at all. (SM)
Just dump it and let the refinery deal with it. They have great ability to warm things up. It is going into the refinery to be cooked anyway, so thawing it out would just be a part of that process. I would say drop it onto a conveyor and take it into the refinery complex. Details would have to be worked out so it could drop onto the conveyor without doing damage, but all that can be worked out.
The bitumen has to be thawed out no matter who does it. So that cost is in the product no matter who does the thawing. So having the refinery thaw it might not give more money the railroads by not haveing to thaw it.
But, it seems like the whole process of unloading would be much faster and more efficient by just dumping the bitumen if a few seconds rather than spending a lot of time cooking it up in the tank cars just to get it out. I would think those tank cars would also need a fair amount of interior cleaning from time to time.
So maybe everyone would make more money by shipping in open top cars and dumping them. Maybe our gasoline would be cheaper.
The cars would probably need to have hinged covers to protect the bitumen.
I have to say, you guys have certainly given me a good laugh.
I'm certainly not trying to sound rude, condescending, superior or anything else. But you guys have no idea what you're talking about........lol. I work in the oil sands industry, directly for one of the largest operators. It seems you fine folks....and I do truly mean that......think bitumen is a different product all together from what it really is.
Let me start by correcting a few comments made earlier. Please, keep in mind, I am not trying to be a jerk, or smart ass terminology nazi. I know first hand that the terminology used can be very important to make sure everyone is talking about the same thing. I just want you folks to have the correct info on the subject.
For starters, dibit is not something added or removed from the bitumen. It is in fact the bitumen itself once it has been mixed with diluent, to thin it out. This actually has to be done to process the product in the first place. So adding it is not cumbersome, wasteful or costly process at all. Recovering the naphtha that is used as a diluent is not an issue either, as the product is simply run through an NRU (Naptha Recovery Unit) during processing, and the naptha is shipped back to the source for reuse.
Bitumen is not nearly as solid as you seem to think. Are any of you familiar with the tar like product used to seal concrete basements and such? Bitumen is very much like that. Sort of half way between a paste and a liquid. Shipping in a gondola as suggested, would be horribly messy, and very wasteful. This stuff stick to EVERYTHING! Add to that, that the plants producing it are not setup to handle it unless it is pumped, and you may see part of the issue. Handling costs at both ends would skyrocket, and the production would slow right down to virtually nothing. The diluent would need to be removed at the source, and reintroduced at the refinery........not at all practical.
Another note, is that asphalt, and bitumen are two very different animals and are not to be confused with one another. They both have very different physical properties, and must be handled quite differently.
The idea of a bathtub type hopper is interesting, but as I mentioned, totally impractical. A liner would have around 6 inches of bitumen stuck to it when it got dumped, then you have to deal with the liner. The idea of burning the liner off during processing will not work, as bitumen is processed as a liquid, not a solid. so every car would end up with a large gooey mess to deal with, once it was dumped. Bitumen would not release from a car quickly at all. it would slowly ooze out, even with a liner. It does not become solid unless it is heavily weathered, and that would have avery detrimental effect on the quality of the product.
Covers would also be an issue. The product is thoroughly processed to remove any traces of fines or granular particles. Dust would be a very significant contaminant should any of the lids not be perfectly sealed.
As for handling it with a conveyor, I can tell you with absolute certainty that it won't work. The material will gum up a conveyor to the point that it will be cheaper to replace the entire conveyor......belt, rollers, idlers, etc..........than it will be to try and clean it so it could be reused. And that's after one car load.
All in all, there were some great thoughts, but without actual knowledge of the material, it's kinda pointless to try and speculate like this.
Like I said, I'm not trying to be rude in any way, and am really just trying to get the truth out there to you folks, so you can base ideas off of some facts. Trying to be helpful, and if it came across in a way other than that, I am sorry. It's not how I intended it.
^
Thank you for your sanity!
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
If the bitumen is so sticky then why doesn't it gum up the power shovels and trucks that take it out of the ground? I get your point about dilbit, but according to Fred's article the conversion to dilbit and then the removal of the diluent at the refinery is a cost. As he put it, it's the packaging the bitumen comes in. He also noted that rail transport requires less diluent than pipeline, thereby bringing the cost of shipping rail more in line with the cost of shipping via pipeline. So the whole dilbit cost thing is indeed a factor to consider, at least according to his article (he put a lot of time into that aspect). I mentioned "cumbersome" ,again, in the context of applying and then removing the diluent. Again, referring to the article, Fred states any diluent used would have to be manufactured/refined and transported to the mine site for use, and then must also be disposed of/recycled at the refinery (which is btw..cost, cost & cost). Don't laugh too hard at us. There's a difference between asking questions and pointless speculation. There just might be a better way than the status quo (i.e. tank cars), and a good starting point is often a question presented by someone who isn't directly involved in the current process and who thus has no vested interest or preconceived ideas on how "it's done". We're just talking here...apparently the rail & tar sands people don't have all the answers either. Every time I turn on the news there's a story about a tank train derailment and more bad news about how "the experts" are defiling the landscape in Alberta. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that's not how its supposed to work.
Greasemonkey,
Thanks for your insight. I don’t mind your contradictions, and it does sound like you know what you are talking about. However, you have not quite convinced me that this idea for a different type of rail car transport is from Mars. The devil is always in the details. If we went back to the beginning of time and someone suggested cooking a ball of natural bitumen up and making gasoline, they would be called nuts. As you know, industrial production systems perform seemingly miraculous processes with ease.
My approach to this sort of brainstorming is to formulate an idea based on my knowledge of the subject and throw it out for others to consider. It is a starting point, and all criticism or endorsement can be judged objectively against that starting point. As this forum so wonderfully demonstrates, there is always enormous opposition to improving an established industrial or manufacturing process. It is human nature. People always conclude that if it were a good idea, it would already be in use. That is the catch-22 that pushes back against all innovation.
Let me ask you this: You say that bitumen is tarlike—like a thick paste. If it flows when heated, I assume that its viscosity varies with temperature. So just for clarification; what is its viscosity like at say 75 degrees F? And then what is it like at zero degrees? From what I have heard, I assume that it set up rock-hard at something like northern climate wintertime temperatures. Is that correct, or is it soft and tarlike at those low temperatures too?
When I suggested using a conveyor, I did not mean dropping a big ball of gooey tar onto what looks like a typical open belt conveyor that might be used for coal or gravel. Maybe it would be more like a shuttle transporter to take the material from the dumper into the plant and loaded into a big heater.
When I look at a process that requires slowly thawing bitumen in tank cars with internal steam coils just to get the bitumen to flow out of a pipe, I think there has got to be a better way. Also, I suspect that such tank cars might be insulated to preserve heat during transport and to make the thawing more efficient. So then you have the added cost of steam coils, steam connections, and insulation for EVERY rail car just to handle a process that might be done by a part of the fixed plant upon delivery of the rail cars.
I can certainly understand why plants would want to handle bitumen by pumping. But I am not convinced that it makes sense to extend that handling process over the rail transportation link of the process.
I don’t see any insurmountable problems with open top rail cars. You mention the bitumen sticking to the cars and the need for tight sealing covers. So make the covers tight sealing. But the key to the rest is the release liner that I mentioned. That may or may not be practical. I don’t have that answer. But the point is that it would prevent the bitumen from contacting any part of the car interior, so the bitumen would not stick to the car. The car interior would have a fine finish without the liner. The liner is inserted, followed by the loading of the bitumen. Upon inverting, the bitumen drops out like a cupcake out of the pan. The liner drops with the bitumen. The interior of the cars is left clean enough to eat off of.
Up to that point, I think it is all very doable. But I don’t know what happens next to separate the liner from the bitumen. The liner could be expendable without an undue cost penalty, but how to deal with separating the liner from the bitumen is the question. Since the bitumen proceeds to a heating process, it seems like the most likely approach would be to simply melt the liner in a way that it is of no consequence to the final processing result.
Otherwise, the liner could simply be stripped off the bitumen cake and run through a washer to remove the residual bitumen. Then the liner would be processed either to destruction or to recover its material. I don’t see the liner being capable of being reused.
It's an idea that might work... Lac Megantic should have taught us that there's much room for improvement.
Euclid, i may be ignorant about this, but in this matter you do seem to make sense to me. It should be possible develop a petroleum-product liner material that would be less costly to make and apply than the dilutant, and would simply merge into the final product. But Ulriich, that was an unkind and uncalled for remark. Lac Magantic was do to a tragic decision by the trainmaster, by undermaintained locomotives, by one really bad operating practice, by a series of coincidences, and by a real lack of Safety First culture. Euclid, you might consider going into more detail on your car design, and maybe an existing grain gondola that can accept a cover and can still be rotary dumped or whatever would fit the bill. You might want to use the intenet to use the "contact" button on several railcar manufacturers' website and see if there is interest in your idea. I am about to do this with my braking and derailment sensing proposals-EMD and GE. But you know what, I woiuld not have come to my ideas if I had not first read yours!
I know Dave...I've amended my remark and deleted the sarcasm.
The original poster provided an excellent reason for why this product is best shipped in tank cars. Since the plants (customers) prefer to handle this product by pumping, the carrier would serve the customer best by using tank cars. Any other method would mean that the customer would have to adapt to fit the needs of the railroad.
Not really, if a better method is found then, yes, they'd all have to adapt; but all would also reap the benefits.
Up until about 1950 most people who travelled abroad did so by ship and therefore ocean side ports were required. When commercial aviation took hold about 1950 travellers adapted by going to airports...they didn't expect the airlines to land at the ports. Change usually requires some adjustments for all involved.
daveklepper Euclid, i may be ignorant about this, but in this matter you do seem to make sense to me. It should be possible develop a petroleum-product liner material that would be less costly to make and apply than the dilutant, and would simply merge into the final product. But Ulriich, that was an unkind and uncalled for remark. Lac Magantic was do to a tragic decision by the trainmaster, by undermaintained locomotives, by one really bad operating practice, by a series of coincidences, and by a real lack of Safety First culture. Euclid, you might consider going into more detail on your car design, and maybe an existing grain gondola that can accept a cover and can still be rotary dumped or whatever would fit the bill. You might want to use the intenet to use the "contact" button on several railcar manufacturers' website and see if there is interest in your idea. I am about to do this with my braking and derailment sensing proposals-EMD and GE. But you know what, I woiuld not have come to my ideas if I had not first read yours!
Thanks for your encouragement Dave. Good luck with showing your ideas to the locomotive builders. I think this oil-by-rail boom opens the door to a lot of new innovation. There are many organizations and manufacturers that one can present new ideas to. Let us know if you get some feedback.
I put the matter on the two major builder's website contact forms and will get back to you when and if there is a response. I did work for EMD in 1952, but wished to be fair to both builders. You do the same with the railcar builders, please!
Ulrich If the bitumen is so sticky then why doesn't it gum up the power shovels and trucks that take it out of the ground? I get your point about dilbit, but according to Fred's article the conversion to dilbit and then the removal of the diluent at the refinery is a cost. As he put it, it's the packaging the bitumen comes in. He also noted that rail transport requires less diluent than pipeline, thereby bringing the cost of shipping rail more in line with the cost of shipping via pipeline. So the whole dilbit cost thing is indeed a factor to consider, at least according to his article (he put a lot of time into that aspect). I mentioned "cumbersome" ,again, in the context of applying and then removing the diluent. Again, referring to the article, Fred states any diluent used would have to be manufactured/refined and transported to the mine site for use, and then must also be disposed of/recycled at the refinery (which is btw..cost, cost & cost). Don't laugh too hard at us. There's a difference between asking questions and pointless speculation. There just might be a better way than the status quo (i.e. tank cars), and a good starting point is often a question presented by someone who isn't directly involved in the current process and who thus has no vested interest or preconceived ideas on how "it's done". We're just talking here...apparently the rail & tar sands people don't have all the answers either. Every time I turn on the news there's a story about a tank train derailment and more bad news about how "the experts" are defiling the landscape in Alberta. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that's not how its supposed to work.
The tar sand material is what the power shovels scoop up, this is (as the name implies) sand with a high bitumen content.
Trucks haul the tar sand to an extraction plant where the bitumen is extracted in the form of a thick, heavy liquid tar -like material, not something you could ship in a gondola.
The bitumen itself must go through further refining to produce "syn-crude"..
the refineries receiving bitumen are not equipped to utilize raw tar sand and shipping the material in this form would be inefficient.
"I Often Dream of Trains"-From the Album of the Same Name by Robyn Hitchcock
Thanks for the clarification. What is the ratio of bitumen to sand? Maybe the extraction plant could be located near the refinery then. Instead of extracting the bitumen at the source, take it out at the refinery. The extracted sand may also be marketable in LA/TX.
I must clarify that I am not proposing to "ship bitumen in a gondola," implying just dumping the raw material into a garden variety existing type of gondola. Of course that would be absurd.
Carnej1 already covered the point on the mining of the sand, but I'll expand on it a bit. The bitumen is locked in a mixture of sand, shale, silt and clay that scours the buckets on the shovels clean, as well as the truck boxes to some extent. The truck boxes still require occasional scraping to clean out buildup in areas where the normal wear of the material sliding out doesn't scour the box clean.
Yes, Fred is partially correct in that diluent is a cost. Adding any product, to any other product will incur a cost. However, what Fred apparently fails to mention, is that the diluent is necessary for processing the bitumen into upgraded synthetic crude oil. Heating the bitumen alone, will not get it to a state that renders the material pumpable, which it must be to go through the upgrading process.
I haven't read Fred's article yet, as my copy hasn't arrived yet, however..............it seems as though, from your description, that it is assumed that all of the diluent is used only once. This is not the case. The diluent is recovered from the dilbit, and sent back to the extraction plant to be reused....over, and over and over.
Something I intended to touch on, but somehow missed last night, is that the majority of the product moving out of the oil sands has already been upgraded to synthetic crude oil. Basically, it comes out looking and behaving much like refined motor oil you buy for end use. It has the approximate consistency of about 40 weight motor oil, and it's even the same colour, as most of the excess carbon which makes crude oil black, has already been removed in the upgrading process.
Please don't mistake my input here as me laughing at you. I am well aware of the fact that there are always ways things can be improved, and I am all in favour of improvements. Unfortunately, the improvements you are suggesting, would actually be a step back.
To do as you are suggesting, the diluent would have to be extracted at the source, then the bitumen would have to be handled in a way that is much more cumbersome, involved, and costly than it is currently. Then, once the bitumen is at the upgrader, the diluent would have to be reintroduced, as it's necessary in the upgrading process.
As for the point about the experts defiling the Alberta landscape, please don't believe everything you hear in the media. The amount of land actually affected is very small. Most reports are based on the total size of the deposits, not the land that is actually disturbed by the mining process. Add to that, the fact that reclamation occurs for every bit of land that is disturbed, and actually produces land that is in better shape for the native vegetation and wildlife, and it downplays the significance and accuracy of these reports considerably. The problem is, reporting the truth doesn't make for the sensational stories the media aims for these days. Nor does it give anything to back up the claims made by some environmental groups.
I'm certainly not against innovation, and finding better ways to do things. I'm all for them in fact. The issue is that, the more times you try and convert a product from one state to another, and back again, you drive up costs. Like it or not, low cost is the ultimate goal of any industrial process.
As for Euclid's question on viscosities at different temps, the bitumen has a lower viscosity at higher temps, of course, but at lower temps, it is still pliable. I'm sorry, but I don't have the info on what viscosity it is at different temps.
You guys need to realize, bitumen and crude oil are very different animals. I keep seeing references to things like Lac Megantic, and while the diluent is a volatile product, the bitumen mixed with the diluent is really no more hazardous than the normal crude oil that gets transported/handled/processed in most places. It is no where near the same as the highly volatile Bakken crude that was involved in Lac Megantic. Now, I realize that the diluent adds a different flare to this example, but raw bitumen is almost inert. You can, and I have, actually hold a torch to it without it lighting on fire. With enough heat, it will burn, but the temperature you need to get it to so that the lighter components flash off and burn, is considerable. That's not really part of this discussion, but I thought I'd toss it in there to help you folks understand what this stuff is really like.
As for the idea of shipping the raw oil sand to the gulf coast, I can say with absolute certainty, you wouldn't want to pay for that. The low end ore runs around 6% bitumen content, and the high grade runs up to around the 20% mark. That may not sound that bad, but understand that you cannot recover all of the bitumen. Typically, around 85% is recoverable, and then it needs to be upgraded. There is a loss of volume in the upgrading process, because there is a considerable amount of sulphur and coke removed in the upgrading process. You can't confuse the cost per barrel of oil, and the cost per barrel of bitumen. Bitumen is a far less valuable product.
The shipping costs alone would be out of this world. Can you imagine how high the price of gasoline would go to compensate for that?
I know I have missed some of what was asked, but there's one of me, and a bunch of you, so I have to skim over things just to try and keep up...LOL. If I missed something, feel free to ask again, I'll answer anything I can, and I am not intentionally avoiding any questions.
Thanks for the detailed post Greasemonkey. that makes sense. I'm not married to the idea of shipping bitumen by dump gondola, was just wondering if it could be done. You've been quite thorough in your answer.
Greasemonkey, before we give up on Euclid's basic idea, what about these factors: A high-side "bathtub" gondola with fitting air-tight cover looks very different than a tank car and may be permit Betumin to be shiped through places where people are fearful of tankcar trains. Also, if Euclid's lining was Teflon, which I understand to be a petroleum product, just Carbon and Hydrogen and possibly Oxigyn atoms, could not the lining just stay with the product and be melted as part of it?
Here's the problem. The Bitumen is not melted and sent for processing. It has to be diluted and pumped into the process, so I'm not sure how a liner could be worked into the process. Plus, it would be kind of pointless to remove the diluent, to ship the product, then reintroduce it so the product could be processed, to remove the diluent again.
It's a neat idea, but a bit impractical given that the product requires the diluent that the idea is trying to remove. Incidentally, the cost of such a liner would likely be fairly high, and teflon has a very high melting point. Much higher than the processing temps of the bitumen.
I would like to see a comprehensive explanation of the logistics and process involving the use or diluent. This has been widely written about here and in Fred Frailey’s blog. However, there is a lot of conflict between the various explanations and descriptions there and with Greasemonkey has explained here. Until that is 100% clear, I would set it aside from my proposal for shipping in open top cars instead of tank cars.
However, I still see an advantage of much quicker unloading with less thermal energy input and less cost overall. I see this idea of shipping in an open top car similar to the improvement offered by shipping grain in covered hoppers as opposed to shipping in boxcars. Why did it take so long to make that obvious improvement?
daveklepperAlso, if Euclid's lining was Teflon, which I understand to be a petroleum product, just Carbon and Hydrogen and possibly Oxigyn atoms, could not the lining just stay with the product and be melted as part of it?
Dave, I thought you were more of an engineer than that. What part of polytetraFLUOROethylene do you suppose might cause problems if it stayed with the ... for want of a better term let's call it 'melbit'?
I, personally, think that all the operant questions about why dilbit is what is shipped in this operation have been satisfactorily answered, and why a solution 'other' than tank cars isn't exactly worth pursuing. That does not mean y'all can't have more fun with the alternative-history engineering -- just that it's not going to produce anything amounting to a 'breakthrough technology' or a replacement for current practice.
There seems to be some interest in the fact that tank cars used to transport bitumen have to have steam heated coils. This is not limited to bitumen; many bulk chemicals transported in tank cars need to be heated to unload.
One that I had experience with in my early years as a young engineer was liquid sodium hydroxide (caustic soda, lye), which is commonly used in the chemical/petrochemical industry. I spent so much time working with this stuff (usually in winter, on the midnight shift), that I still cringe when someone mentions it.
Bitumen has various viscosities, from asphalt like material, sand consistency, very thick tar, lighter tar-like liquid, heavy crude, light crude even a fine flowing oil like substance, the crude from the tar sands is not extracted directly from the ground and stuffed into tank cars, it is run through a refining process (a very EXPENSIVE process!) and many types of extracted bitumen is shipped out, why all bitumen is not refined and processed on site is still a big mystery to most Canadians, but we like to ship out all our basic raw resources to other countries so they can refine and process the material so Canada has to buy it back in a finished product.
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