The Unwavering Inventor

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Is it his demand to retain property rights or problems with the technology that has kept Jan Kruyer’s bitumen separation technique uncommercial for decades? This article appears in the November issue of Oilsands Review

By Peter McKenzie-Brown
In 1982, Oilweek magazine published a brief article titled “Oleophilic sieve separation process offers advantages.” The item offers a schematic diagram, test result tables and, in general, a thoughtful description of the latest piece of oilsands technology.

This oleophilic sieve offered improved bitumen recovery from the oilsands and from the sludge in tailings ponds. It also offered reduced water pollution. The magazine indicated that although the inventor, Jan Kruyer, had conceived the technology while working for the Alberta Research Institute, there was a dispute about licensing and patents for the technology.

That was then and this is now. Strangely enough, in the intervening decades the main thing that has changed is that the debate over intellectual property has been settled. Jan Kruyer, who is now 77 years old, has spent half of his adult life trying to get recognition for his technology, and to get a major oilsands company to adopt it.

If the technology has the potential he suggests, most of the environmental problems associated with oilsands mining would blow away with the wind. Of course, there is also the adage that “if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” The Oilsands Review decided to investigate.

The Inventor
Jan Kruyer is a colourful character who has dedicated most of his adult life to oilsands development. An immigrant from the Netherlands who experienced the full horror of the Second World War, he arrived in Alberta as a young man of 17 in 1950. He began working on a farm, and then took a variety of unskilled urban jobs. Eventually, he settled into a night job at a service station in Calgary.

In his twenties he upgraded his high school education and then went on to the University of Alberta. So agreeable is his personality that a scholarship provided by gas station customers funded his first couple of years at the University of Alberta.

Although he hadn’t yet finished his formal schooling, Kruyer began working at the Alberta Research Council (ARC) in 1961 – the same year Karl Clark, who in the 1920s invented the hot water process for separating bitumen from oilsands, retired. Kruyer received a degree in chemical engineering in 1963 after a year’s educational sabbatical, then returned to ARC. In total, he worked at ARC and AOSTRA (Alberta Oil Sands Technology Research Authority) for nearly 20 years.

His departure involved a scandal. He had applied for the patent in 1976 without his employer’s knowledge. When AOSTRA demanded that he sign over the rights, he refused. “When I started working for AOSTRA,” he says, “the first thing they said to me was that if I invented anything I would have to give my intellectual property over to the organization. I said, ‘If I give you the patents you will market them, and I will end up with a pittance and there is no reason for me to do that because I am not a civil servant. I am an independent researcher, and I do not want to become a civil servant.’” He says AOSTRA provided “perhaps $50,000” in initial research funding, but cut off the cash when he refused to sign over the patents. He was later fired.

Kruyer’s insistence on his ownership of the technology became a cause célèbre. Few people were neutral on the case, which crawled through the courts. Perhaps a bit naïvely, Kruyer says “The Research Council after they fired me hired a very smart engineer to try and repeat the work I had done and make it work, and he couldn’t. No matter how well he tried he couldn’t make it work, so the Research Council boxed it all up and they came to me and they said ‘Let us come to an agreement. We are an organization that wants to advance the oilsands of Alberta, and we tried to kill you when we should be helping you.’ That’s the reason we ended up with an agreement. A court-consent agreement gave (Kruyer’s company) full control of the technology.”

He spent the 1980s in particular promoting his technology. A memorable photo from the Edmonton Journal shows him drinking a glass of tailings pond water after his system had processed out the sludge.

The Invention
What is this technology, and how does it work? Kruyer had developed the oleophilic sieve separation process as an alternative to Clark’s hot water process. In addition, he viewed it as an effective technology for removing bitumen from tailings ponds.

The concept behind it is simple. If you take a spade to the oilsands, most of the mixture will fall away as you empty the shovel. However, some of the bitumen will stick to the head of the shovel – and to its wooden handle, for that matter. The reason is that metal and most other materials are oleophilic: they attract oil. That is the principle upon which Kruyer’s separation system is based.

Bitumen separation takes place in two stages. The first is oleophilic agglomeration; the second is oleophilic sieving. The system is much simpler than it sounds.

Agglomeration takes place when a slurry or sludge containing bitumen is fed through a turning tumbler containing a variety of steel balls. Tiny shreds of bitumen adhere to the balls, and gradually combine with other bits of bitumen. As the tumbling goes on, the bitumen forms into streamers hundreds or thousands of times larger than the original bitumen and oil particles. In this way, the bitumen agglomerates into ever-larger streamers of bitumen. Clay, sand and water, which do not attract oil, separate naturally from the bitumen as the tumbler turns.

Once agglomeration has taken place, Kruyer’s process passes the mixture through a sieve. Also manufactured from steel, the sieve is like a mesh screen. Since it too is oleophilic, the sieve captures the oil while the clay, sand and water pass on through. The bitumen is recovered from the sieve as the process continues.

Not only does the system recover bitumen. Since metals and metallic ores like zircon and titanium adhere to the bitumen during processing, they don’t end up in the tailings ponds. This reduces heavy metal pollution. It also enables the oilsands producer to create value by extracting these materials from the bitumen and selling them for industrial purposes. Metals recovery takes place during normal upgrading operations.

Kruyer no longer pitches this technology as an alternative to Karl Clark’s hot water process. However, he believes that by using it to treat sludge and froth from tailings ponds it can recover bitumen and reduce chemical “fines.”

How much additional bitumen could the process recover? “Typically,” he says, “bitumen mining projects lose 10 percent of the oil they mine. (Of that amount) perhaps 6 percent will eventually settle to the bottom of a tailings pond as sludge. With our process, we can go into that sludge and recover anywhere from 75 percent to 90 percent of the bitumen. This includes the bitumen mats that are floating at various levels in the tailings ponds.… The amount we recover really depends on the percent of bitumen remaining in the sludge. If the amount of bitumen in the sludge is only 2 percent, which is low, we can recover 50 percent. However, if the amount is 6 percent, we have proven in our pilot plants that we can recover 90 percent.”

If the Kruyer technology really works, potential benefits range from ecological to economic. Given these levels of bitumen recovery, the system would be virtually self-financing. Process water would be cleaner. So would the clay, which would therefore be easier to dispose of. In addition, you wouldn’t need to add gypsum into the tailings pond to settle clay particles. Reducing the size of the tailings pond could enable the operator to expand the mine. Finally, of course, the public relations benefits of being able to demonstrate a “greener” oilsands plant would be huge.

The Controversy
It would be a simple matter to say that the promises are great but the proof isn’t there. In this particular case, however, papers presented by Suncor and by AOSTRA tend to support Kruyer’s case. Both date from 1985.

Among them, AOSTRA, Syncrude and Suncor invested several million dollars in testing the technology. An AOSTRA report was particularly favourable, although it should be noted that one of the three authors was Kruyer. At one point, the authors say “the pilot plant was simple to construct and operate. It functions well without major interruptions, requiring minimal operator supervision. Separation of bitumen was effectively carried out at pilot plant ambient temperatures (15°C). The only heating required was for removing bitumen from the oleophilic sieve to yield a free-flowing, warm, good quality deaerated bitumen product. Solution water was not required nor any chemicals used to separate the fresh sludge.” Suncor researcher I.C. Webster was one of the authors of this document.

Webster was also one of the authors of the Suncor research paper, which was far more critical. Suncor had tested the system for processing sludge but also for primary bitumen extraction. The researchers found that primary recovery was comparable to that of the tried-and-true Karl Clark hot water process. While the numbers in the Suncor paper suggested that bitumen recovery using the process was good whether you extracted the stuff from oilsand slurry or from tailings pond sludge, the researchers complained that operating components were unreliable. They described numerous technical challenges and were not nearly as sanguine in their conclusions as AOSTRA.

Kruyer argues that Suncor’s pilot plant made his system unnecessarily complex. The problems occurred because company engineers added too many pots and pans to a basically simple process.

Kruyer says Texaco and Petro-Canada also tested the system. Also, “Sohio was very interested in using this in the oilsands in Utah,” he adds with unintended humour, “until a court case stopped them from developing the Utah sands.”

Why has the Kruyer process not become an industry standard? The Oilsands Review believes there are two probable reasons.

The less likely reason is that his powerful sense of ownership is standing in the way. Kruyer, however, believes that intellectual property issues are the main issue. “I am a poor inventor,” he says, “and that means I have to depend on industry to fund the work I do. The problem has always been that they want to own the technology. I have always refused to give up the ownership, and that has been a hurdle that has slowed it down.” He continues, “Patenting protects the right of the person who has a bright idea. As soon as companies decide that they will develop the technology by themselves and share it among themselves, they are competing with the whole objective of the patent procedure. They are saying that patent protection is not the right of society.”

“My insisting on a royalty is the reason this technology has not yet become the standard. I fully understand why they want to have this process without paying a royalty. However, my attitude is simply different. I don’t want to be pushed aside. You see, when the sludge program was so successful and the industry couldn’t do it but we could, they came to me and said ‘We would like to develop this technology ourselves and we will just push you aside.’ I don’t think they have the right to do that. Intellectual property is the property of the person or persons who pay for development. It is not the right of industry just to grab something and take it away.”

The more likely reason the Kruyer process has not caught on is that his invention is not as effective or as low-cost as the inventor would like to believe.

The Oilsands Review asked for assessments of the Kruyer process from technical people at both Syncrude and Suncor. Neither company was willing to publically comment, citing corporate policy. Off the record, however, a manager familiar with the research said that his company “agreed to disagree with Kruyer on the value of his method.”

In a way, Kruyer raised the first red flags about this technology when he reported that his successor at AOSTRA couldn’t make the system work; there must be a message in that. Despite substantial investments in research, the industry has not identified his process as a silver bullet.

Whatever the future holds for the Kruyer process, the inventor’s dedication to his technology deserves recognition and respect. His years in the wilderness are a tribute to his belief in the importance of intellectual property, to his understanding of the worth of Alberta’s oilsands and to his Dutch stubbornness. Jan Kruyer should be celebrated as an oilsands pioneer.