Barb,
You say the longs of Solv-Ex refuse to see the reality that has been proven. I have asked both you and Sid to give the technical reasons why the process doesn't work, without an answer, most likely because you don't have one. But I have some information that I'd love to have you comment on. There is a posting on Asensio's web site dated June 16, 1997 that you should read again. I'll explain why I think it does the opposite of what Asensio intended.
Chemical separation processes take advantage of the fact, that if you subject two or more items to the same environment, that there will be a physical factor that will cause them to separate. A simple example is the boiling of salt water. You simply raise the temperature of the solution to a point where water evaporates, but the salt remains behind as a solid. I am not privy to Solv-Ex's technology, but I can give you a possible scenario of what they might be doing. Solv-Ex may be using the fact that oil is not soluble in, and less dense than water, along with the fact, that the tailings are not soluble in, and more dense than water. If you put the tar sands in a boiler and heat it to a sufficient temperature, the bitumen would become less viscous to a point where it would separate from the tailings and would naturally rise to the top (similar to what you see during an oil spill in the ocean). The tailings would naturally go to the bottom because they are more dense than water. You would then extract the bitumen from the top of the boiler, and the tailings from the bottom. The layers in between would be a mixture of tailings, bitumen, and water, and would be worthless.
The above may not be the exact process, but that isn't important. I do not believe there is chemical separation process where the desired product does not come out of one end or the other, and certainly not in this case. I would never expect the middle layers to be worth anything. But Asensio in his article states that the terminated employee took samples from the middle layers of the log washers and sent them to a lab somewhere to have them analyzed. And guess who got the results? With all the credentials this employee had, he certainly should have known beforehand that the middle layers would be exactly as Asensio described them, exactly what we would expect, and a gross misrepresentation of the final output that Solv-Ex is attempting to produce.
I tend to agree with Asensio that this former employee provided definitive proof of fraud. We just disagree by whom. |
