Glossary

Auxiliary Settling Areas: Smaller versions of PSVs.
Coker: Where bitumen is cracked by heat into its fractions of naphtha, light gas oil and heavy gas oil for further processing.
Crushers: Two rollers to break up large chunks of oil sand.
Diluent Recovery Units: Where gas oils, naphtha and water are separated from bitumen.
Distillation: Turning liquid into vapour – usually done by heating.
Distilled: Turning liquid into vapour – usually done by heating.
Draglines and bucketwheel reclaimers: Large draglines would mine the oil sand and place in windrows for BWR to place onto conveyor system for transport to dump pocket.
Froth: A foamy bitumen, water and air mixture.
Froth Treatment Plant: Removes water and solids from the bitumen froth by diluting with naphtha and feeding either two stages of centrifuges or inclined plate settlers (IPS).
Heavy gas oil: Hydrocarbon with 40 to 70 carbon atoms per molecule.
Hydrotransport: A pipeline designed to carry oil sand slurry from Mining to Extraction facilities at both Mildred Lake and Aurora.
Hydrotreater: Where product streams are saturated with hydrogen and passed through catalyst to remove sulphur and nitrogen impurities.
LC-Finer: A continuous hydrocracking process, which breaks bitumen down through hydrogen addition over an expanded ebullating catalyst bed to produce a lower boiling product.
Light gas oil: Hydrocarbon with 30 to 40 carbon atoms per molecule.
Naptha: Hydrocarbon with 4 to 15 carbon atoms per molecule.
Overburden: A layer of rocky, clay-like material directly above the oil sand deposit.
Primary Separation Vessels: Deep cone vessels designed to recover most of the bitumen. Froth floats to the top, sand settles to the bottom and the middlings are pumped to Tailings Oil Recovery.
Primary Upgrading: The processing stage in which bitumen is separated into various streams of hydrocarbons.
Secondary Upgrading: The processing stage in which impurities such as sulphur and nitrogen are removed using hydrogen and catalyst.
Slurry: A mixture of oil sand and water.
Surface mining:: Technique used to remove all material exposing the desired ore deposit.
Syncrude Sweet Blend: A synthetic crude oil consisting primarily of naphtha, light gas oil and heavy gas oil.
Tailings Oil Recovery: Froth from the TOR vessels is recycled to the PSVs to improve its quality.
Trucks and shovels: Shovels dig oil sand, 400-ton trucks haul it to crushers.
Vacuum Distillation Unit: Vacuum tower in which gas oils are flashed off and sent to hydrotreaters, bypassing cokers and LC Finer.
Vibrating Screens: where large materials such as rocks, sticks and lumps of clay are rejected prior to the slurry entering the Superpot.