Enrichment of Baltic oil shale

Abstract

Baltic oil shale has long been recognized as a raw material for the chemical and gas industries and as an energy fuel. In this regard, the issues of exploitation of shale deposits and the enrichment of extracted shale are becoming important. The beneficiation of shale, which began simultaneously with their extraction, from the very beginning to the present day is carried out in all mines by manual selection of rock (limestone). The use of mechanical (non-manual) enrichment of oil shale is unknown. The question of mechanical enrichment of oil shale arose by analogy with coal and in connection with the sharply increasing scale of its production. Of the mechanical enrichment processes, hydrogravity is the most studied. For a number of reasons, aerogravity and flotation are less studied. The materials obtained as a result of all the studies make it possible to evaluate the Baltic oil shale as an object of enrichment and to identify approximate indicators of their enrichment. This work aims to summarize the materials accumulated over the past 20-25 years on the beneficiation of oil shale in the Baltic states and outline a number of conclusions that follow from them.