Nevtah’s prototype extraction unit being tested in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Nevtah Capital Management has joined forces with two joint venture partner companies: Amerisands, LLC, a private Nevada-based company with a major oil sands lease in Asphalt Ridge, Utah, and Triple X Ventures Corp., a Vancouver-based resource company with experience in raising capital for resource-focused projects in North America. The joint venture partners are working on a commercially-viable Liquid Extraction System (LES) technology that will be environmentally-friendly and will be incorporated into an oil shale extraction technology, recently acquired from a European energy company.

APPLICATIONS OF THE TECHNOLOGY:

• Commercial production of oil extracted from oil sands/shale deposits, including heavy bitumen oil.
• Environmental clean-up applications of any organic spill and/or tailing ponds that contain oil/detergent/water residues subsequent to traditional oil extraction and/or oil sands projects, oil or water based.

FEATURES OF THE TECHNOLOGY:

• Closed loop, solvent-based technology.
• Benign, environmentally-friendly solvents.
• Continuous flow feed system.
• Technology requires no water, no high temperatures or high pressure and emits no greenhouse gases.
• Solvents are recycled.
• Technology is economically viable and environmentally friendly.
• The LES extraction system is capable of extracting up to 98% of hydrocarbons.
• Extraction units are mobile, versatile.
• Includes proprietary methods to ultra-purify resultant sands/shale to concentration levels lower than 0.1%.
• Technology is commercially viable and ready for commercial applications.
• Overall costs of production have been verified within a range of $12.50 to $21.50 USD per barrel.

Between the period of 2003 to 2009, Nevtah Capital Management has expended over $ 8,000,000 USD in order to create a commercially-viable, environmentally-friendly oil extraction system that could be scalable to commercial standards. In earlier testing that took place in Oklahoma, certain solvent combinations proved that they were only effective for short periods of time during the extraction process and that to be commercially-viable, the LES technology would have to be effective during long production runs. Nevtah and its partners, Amerisands and Triple X Ventures, appointed two talented chemical research teams (one in San Diego and the other based in Europe) to investigate effective solvents that would provide the technology with commercial-level extraction over longer periods of time.

The research teams concluded that the successful extraction of oil from oil sands and oil shale materials was not a problem based on technology, but rather a project focused on the properties of solvent combinations. After several months of experimenting with a vast array of solutions and their effects on each other, the partners’ research teams have now identified a group of solutions that are effective in oil extraction on a continuous basis ... expressly for commercial-size production runs. These solutions are benign, non-toxic, non-volatile, non-hazardous, biodegradable and environmentally-friendly. Oil recovery rates during laboratory testing are now averaging in the high 90’s percentile range, while solution recovery rates are steady at 99%, which facilitate the reuse of the solutions in subsequent production runs. These solutions are relatively inexpensive and readily available, making the extraction process economically viable. The research team has now completed its material and engineering flow configurations and has also completed a series of comprehensive computer modeling for mass and energy flow, including production costs. The overall technological process including equipment design, enhancement of closed-loop cycles for continuous flow extraction, regeneration of solutions and purification studies of oil sands and refinement of the rectification process have now been completed. Preliminary engineering drawings have been prepared and are ready for discussions with several fabrication companies in eastern Europe.

In recent developments various oil shale samples have been tested with designated solutions for extraction purposes under laboratory environments. These oil shale samples from the Middle East were successfully extracted at a rate of 98.6% of its existing hydrocarbons. This is an impressive result at it opens up a tremendous opportunity in the extraction process of oil shale in an environmentally-friendly process. Most oil shale extraction throughout the world is carried out using the Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage method, which requires a high quantity of water, heat and considerable energy, which is accompanied by the production of a high level of greenhouse gases.

The next stage of technological development entails the fabrication of at least two prototype units, one for oil sands extraction testing (in Utah) and another for oil shale extraction testing (in a selected Middle East country). The joint venture partners are now in discussions with several financial groups in order to raise the necessary capital for both projects. Further developments will be announced with the appropriate news releases.