Innovation Anthology #172: Professor Emeritus, Dept of Oncology

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One of the materials Syncrude Canada is using to reconstruct the boreal landscape after mining bitumen is tailings leftover from production.

Through its Instrumented Watersheds program, Syncrude scientists have found that tailings behave like fine sand with lots of silt.

According to environmental scientist Clara Qualizza, the tailings watershed acts as a large storage site for sand, but without artificial drainage.

CLARA QUALIZZA: When we place tailings sand, we pour it. It’s moved in a pipeline so its carried in water. And it takes a while for that water to drain out of the tailings sands. And so that water seeps out at the low points in the landscape where the wetlands would be. We had built an area that didn’t have much topographic relief and another area that had quite a lot of hills and valleys. And the one that had lots of hills in it had flushed and the water had drained out of those sands quicker.

As Clara Qualizza explains, this flushing is important to reducing salinity in the reconstructed watershed.

Thanks today to Syncrude Canada.

I’M CHERYL CROUCHER

Guest

Dr Linda Pilarski,

University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada,

Sponsor

Syncrude

Program Date: 2008-10-02