Significance of conditioning pretreatment on enrichment and flotation of oil shale

Abstract

The effect of stirring and attrition-scrubbing conditioning pretreatment on organic content enrichment was investigated. A relatively coarse particle size (−0.5 + 0.1 mm) was used to avoid high comminution cost, the environmental impact of fines disposal plus their technical defects in the retorting process. The results showed that the pretreatment in acidic medium was promising due to carbonate minerals dissolution leading to higher liberation and cleaning the particles’ surface. The organics % was enriched from 26.5% to 33.2% at pH 3 using the conditioning step only, while after flotation, organics % were increased to 43% with a recovery of 50%.

Keywords:

• Attrition-scrubbing
• froth flotation
• oil shale
• organics enrichment
• pretreatment
• stirring