In my view of this process, it's widely employed in the refinary stage to create finished products, such as various gas from distill tower, or cracking down heavy gas product into light product such as gasoline..

However, what they are doing here are not for the same purpose. They are employing the same sort of principles to extract crude oils from Bitumen for further processing. So in a way, it's not conventional because the conventional techniques were NOT for this process.

And what they are demonstrating here may not be technical enough to interpret the benefit of this process. Because if they have these intermediate steps to convert Bitumen into crude,then the synthetic crude maybe too expensive to compete with traditional crude. So we have to see what other cost savings plan they have in order to bring the expenses down.

To my knowledge, China actually does not have a cost effective strategy on refining oil sands since it's very costly.