Recovery of residual bitumen, dewatering, and consolidation of oil sands tailings with poly(acrylamide-co-lauric acid)

[Display omitted] •Acrylamide and lauric acid copolymers (PAMLA) help recover residual bitumen in oil sands mature fine tailings (MFT)•PAMLA can also be used as an additive to improve the performance of commercial flocculants, such as polyacrylamides.•One of the copolymers, PAMLA-30, substantially improved the performance of anionic, neutral, and cationic PAMs, by producing clear supernatants and higher solids content after filtration.•The recovered bitumen may be recycled to generating revenue to cover at least part of the costs associated with this environmental remediation process. Mature fine tailings, a byproduct of bitumen extraction from oil sands, are a major environmental concern for the Canadian oil sands industry. Besides trapping up to 85% of water by volume, tailings also retain about 1 to 3 % of residual bitumen. Recycling bitumen could generate additional revenue to offset the costs associated with treating tailings ponds. In this article, we made a series of new acrylamide and lauric acid copolymers that act as additives to helps recover residual bitumen, increase water recovery, and retrieve sediments with higher solids content using. These novel poly(acrylamide-co-lauric acid) are not meant to be used alone, but rather to improve the performance of commercial flocculants, such as polyacrylamides.