BITUMEN CONTENT ESTIMATION OF ATHABASCA OIL SAND FROM BROAD BAND INFRARED REFLECTANCE SPECTRA B. Rivard, 1 * D. Lyder, 2 J. Feng, 1 A. Gallie, 3 E. Cloutis, 4 P. Dougan, 5 S. Gonzalez, 5 D. Cox 6 and M.G. Lipsett 7 1. Earth Observation Systems Laboratory, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E3 2. Alberta Environment, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T5J 1G4 3. Department of Earth Sciences, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada P3E 2C6 4. Department of Geography, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada 5. Syncrude Canada Ltd, 9421-17 Ave., Edmonton, Canada T6N 1H4 6. Suncor Energy, Inc., P.O. Box 4001, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada T9H 3E3 7. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2G8 Oil sand is a mixture of quartz grains, clay minerals, bitumen, water, and minor accessory minerals. There is a need in oil sands mining operations for a robust method to estimate total bitumen content in real time; and so modelling of the total bitumen content (TBC) in Athabasca oil sands of Western Canada was undertaken on the basis of hyperspectral reflectance spectra. A selection of different bitumen, water, and clay mineral spectral features (3.0–30.0 m) was used to develop broad-band TBC predictive models that have good accuracy, with less than 1.5% error with respect to laboratory methods of bitumen assay. These models are also robust, in that they are independent of mine location. Simple broad band models, based upon previously identified Gaussian features or wavelet features, provide an incremental improvement over the currently deployed industry two-band ratio model. An improved two-band model was also developed, which makes use of a combination of the same two bands but normalised to their mean. A wavelet-based, broad-band model comprised of indices and five bands, where the bands are normalised to the mean of the bands, adequately addresses the influence of water, clay, and textural variation on selected bitumen features. This five-band model appears to produce the most robust estimator of TBC, with a dispersion of ∼1.1–1.5%, which can be applied to different sites within a mine and to different mines without additional tuning or calibration, as evidenced by regression slopes of 0.99–1.0 for modelling, validation, and blind data sets. Keywords: oil sand, bitumen, infrared, reflectance spectra INTRODUCTION O il sand is a mixture of quartz grains, clay minerals, bitu- men (a mixture of heavy hydrocarbons), water, and minor accessory minerals (Bichard, 1987). Typically oil recovery in surface-mineable Athabasca oil sands deposits involves excava- tion of the ore, which is then mixed with heated water and process additives to encourage separation (Schramm et al., 2000; Fong et al., 2004). The ore deposits are not homogeneous and the ore dis- plays considerable variability in clay, bitumen, and fines (Bichard, 1987; Hepler and His, 1989), which impact bitumen recovery. High-accuracy (≤0.1%) determination of total bitumen con- tent (TBC) by % weight (%wt) in oil sand ore is conducted by traditional analytical approaches, which are time consuming (typ- * Author to whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail address: benoit.rivard@ualberta.ca Can. J. Chem. Eng. 88:830–838, 2010 © 2010 Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering DOI 10.1002/cjce.20343 Published online 17 June 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). | 830 | THE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING | | VOLUME 88, October 2010 |