I can't take credit for the find buy I thought I'd copy paste in good faith lol
Great read, mentions our technology which is being ramped up for albania, canada & Iraq :
A single sonicator is the size of a van and “kind of looks like an hour glass on its side,” Arato says. The machine has a large steel bar through the middle and no moving parts when activated. “We put an electromagnetic force around the bar so that it vibrates,” Arato explains. “What we’re doing allows us to shake the hell out of anything that we want very, very quickly.”
“Think about Texas or Saudi Arabia. Both of those places are sitting on balloons; you stick a straw in the ground, suck [oil] out and it’s perfect. The stuff in Alberta isn’t,” says Claudio Arato, Sonoro’s director of engineering and technology. The company operates in Alberta, Albania and Iraq, where oil is heavier and has higher metal and sulphur content than Texas or Saudi Arabia.
That’s where Sonoro claims an advantage. The company has developed a sonicator that removes the contaminating asphaltenes from heavy oil using sonic energy. The process lowers the density of heavy oil and thereby increases the quality of the product by as much as 10 per cent. A single sonicator is the size of a van and “kind of looks like an hour glass on its side,” Arato says. The machine has a large steel bar through the middle and no moving parts when activated. “We put an electromagnetic force around the bar so that it vibrates,” Arato explains. “What we’re doing allows us to shake the hell out of anything that we want very, very quickly.”
The sonicators let oil producers scale their production easily. “We can start at 5,000 barrels per day, go to 10,000, to 25,000 – or you can go from one to 10 directly,” Arato says. The machines are modular and can be stacked on top of one another or side by side.
“If you’re selling that de-asphalted oil into a refinery, depending on what kind of refinery, you can also see an improvement in the price you get,” says Sonoro president and CEO Richard Wadsworth. Before joining Sonoro, Wadsworth was head of Calgary-based Bankers Petroleum, where he extracted heavy oil in Albania. He says that Albania has no pipeline network and no refineries of its own, which means Sonoro’s technology will be a major asset for heavy-oil producers in that country by increasing the quality of the oil before it goes to a refinery.
Sonoro has also won exclusive rights for exploration, development and production of asphalt in a 24,000-square-kilometre area in the Salah ad Din Governate in Iraq, which Wadsworth describes as “one of the largest potential growth markets in the world.”
