Innovation Anthology #350:
When it comes to oil sands production, toxic tailings ponds could one day just be a bad memory.
Instead, you’ll find in their place fully functioning lakes.
That’s the hope of Syncrude Canada Ltd as it develops a new technology called water cap tailings.
Leading the research project at Base Mine Lake is Samantha Tavener.
SAMANTHA TAVENER: So this technology is simply taking tailings, and tailings is coming from the process where we use water to extract oil from sand, and at the tail end of the process, we get clays, fines, and some unrecovered bitumen. And the clays hold onto some water. So we put the tailings in a mined out pit. And then we put the water over top of it. So that’s the water capped tailings project. We spent over 20 years of research starting in the lab and then moving to field scale test ponds looking at this technology. So with 20 years evidence, we’re confident that this full scale demonstration will generate a viable lake.
Samantha Tavener says the commercial scale demonstration project for water cap tailings will get underway in 2012 and it will reclaim the old mine pit at Base Mine Lake.
Thanks today to Syncrude Canada Ltd
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
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Sponsor
Syncrude
Program Date: 2010-11-02