Abstract
Oil sand contains about 15 wt% bitumen which contains approximately 5 wt% sulfur. Bitumen must be extracted from sand and desulfurized before use as a fuel. Currently, bitumen is recovered from sand using hot water (80 °C) and sulfur is removed by hydrodesulfurization (200–450 °C), which both consume large amounts of energy. Therefore, we investigated the separation of bitumen from sand and the oxidative desulfurization of bitumen using ultrasound and n-pentane at 20 °C. We successfully extracted 95 wt% bitumen from sand and removed 66.1% of the sulfur by oxidative desulfurization using 15 wt% H2O2 and 5 mol/L NaOH.