Heavy Oil Solutions
Heavy Oil Solutions
Heavy Oil Solutions Inc. is a heavy oil process technology solutions provider transforming global heavy oil supply chains through hydrothermal partial upgrading. HOS’s proprietary upgrading systems convert heavy oil and bitumen into HOS Synthetic, a higher-value, middle-distillate-rich, pipeline-transportable upgraded crude transportable without diluent. By integrating with production, HOS helps producers improve netbacks, eliminate diluent dependence, expand effective transportation capacity, lower upstream emissions intensity, improve water recovery and enable refiners to maximize transportation fuel output. Optimizing the balance between security, affordability and sustainability through energy innovation, HOS is advancing its Canada Showcase as the foundation for a producer-focused licensing model serving thermal heavy oil producers in Canada, Latin America, and other major heavy oil basins.
Working hard to improve the lives of our people, the people we serve and the people of the communities we operate within.
Heavy Oil Solutions began with Dr. Steve Yarbro, a Los Alamos engineer who had spent his career solving problems where chemistry, pressure, heat, and national consequence met. The roots of the technology trace back to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where related supercritical water processes were applied to destroy organics in nuclear waste at the Hanford site, and later sharpened as Yarbro evaluated technical solutions following the Gulf Coast BP Amoco spill.
In 2013, he took that hard-earned scientific insight into his garage in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and began turning it into something the heavy oil industry had long needed but never quite achieved: practical upgrading at the point of production.
What followed was not a straight line. HOS spent more than a decade in stealth R&D, investing over $15 million to move from proof of concept to a working pilot system. The team built, rebuilt, and reconfigured the pilot plant more than a half dozen times, running the system through failures, process upsets, changing feed chemistries, pressure and temperature ranges, and materials challenges. Each setback became data; each rebuild made the process simpler, tougher, and more commercially realistic.
Yarbro's persistence became the company's defining advantage. Where others saw heavy oil as a transportation, emissions, and refining constraint, he saw a chemistry problem waiting to be solved. HOS ultimately cracked the code by using hydrothermal upgrading to transform heavy oil and produced water emulsions into higher-value, pipeline-ready crude while reducing the complexity traditionally associated with hydrocracking and field upgrading.
Today, HOS stands on that founder's journey: born from Los Alamos science, proven through garage-built grit and pilot-plant adversity, and now scaling a breakthrough designed to reshape global heavy oil supply chains. The story is not just one of invention, but of endurance: a decade of disciplined experimentation culminating in a technology that can make heavy oil cleaner, more valuable, easier to transport, and more competitive in the modern energy economy.
The values that guide our engineering, decisions, and daily focus.