American Sands Energy, an oil sands exploration and development company operating in Utah, announced that it has completed the purchase of its pilot plant used to demonstrate its water-free extraction of bitumen, or heavy oil, from leased oil sands deposits it intends to mine.
The agreement with Elemax included a combination of cash and stock to purchase the trailer-mounted mobile oil recovery system.
The pilot plant, which the company has successfully used to process up to one ton of oil sand per hour over multiple days, will be used by American Sands to evaluate other opportunities for hydrocarbon recovery projects while the company moves towards initial production at its Sunnyside location.
"We are pleased to complete the purchase of our trial production unit," said Will Gibbs, chairman and CEO. "The pilot plant has historically been used by AMSE to demonstrate the efficacy of our technology, which uses no water, consumes 60 percent less energy than traditional oil sands mining operations, requires no tailing ponds and produces no toxic byproducts."
Gibbs added that, going forward, "In addition to the pilot plant being the engineering model for our initial planned 5,000 barrel-per-day plant in Utah, we also plan to work with industry partners around the world that can utilize our scalable technology to extract oil from solid materials such as oil sands, oil shale and other substances."