Steam-solvent coinjection processes have received more attention in the past decade due to the environmental impact of the pure steam injection process. Increasingly restrictive environmental regulations including carbon tax have served to push the industry to consider coinjection processes (steam + solvent) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Understanding the phase behavior of solvent/bitumen mixtures is critical for feasibility studies as well as the design and implementation of a successful coinjection process. This study presents the vapor-liquid equilibria for bitumen/ethane mixtures and their applications for bitumen recovery processes. Experiments were conducted for temperatures up to 190 degrees C and pressures up to 10 MPa to simulate the conditions of in situ steam processes. The results of our vapor-liquid equilibrium experiments include solubility, viscosity, and density measurements of the saturated liquid phase, k-values, and gas oil ratio. Increasing the temperature from 50 to 150 degrees C resulted in a significant drop in ethane solubility in the bitumen. However, increasing the temperature from 150 to 190 degrees C had a negligible impact on solubility. As a result, viscosity reduction is much lower at higher temperatures. The viscosity of ethane-saturated bitumen changed linearly with pressure at three temperatures (100, 150, and 190 degrees C) in a semilog plot. A nonlinear trend was recorded at high pressure and 50 degrees C with liquid-liquid behavior characteristics. The solubility of ethane is in the same range for the three bitumen samples used in this study which indicates that this characteristic of Athabasca bitumen is not dependent on geographical location.