This computational study addresses oil sands separation under microwave irradiation. Electric field distribution and microwave energy dissipation were analyzed at the level of sand particles and bitumen. The simplified model does not include water or gas present in the oil sands. The microwave power dissipated in bitumen was found to be about 32 times that of the sand particles. In order to investigate the feasibility of heating the bitumen phase preferentially and sustaining a thermal gradient between the bitumen phase and the solid phase, thereby reducing the thermal losses to the solid phase, time scales were estimated using several different scenarios. The small size of the particles in the solid phase caused the time needed to reach thermal equilibrium between phases to be extremely short, in the order of 10 to 100 ms. To achieve separation times shorter than these, pressures up to 100 GPa would have to be sustained across the oil sands layer. Alternatively, buoyancy-driven separation by settling would require accelerations in the order of 100 000 m/s(2) (10(5) g). Therefore, the heating and separation of bitumen within the thermal conduction time scales seem to be theoretically possible but associated with high technological challenges in their implementation.