Innovation Anthology #632:
Dr. Mathew Lindsay from the University of Saskatchewan holds the new NSERC/Syncrude Industrial Research Chair in Mine Closure Geochemistry.
His research will look at how materials used to reclaim oil sands mines behave and evolve over time.
One of those materials he’s studying is centrifuge fine tailings.
DR. MATTHEW LINDSAY Essentially what this technology is, is there’s a chemical added to the tailings. Its a polymer and what it does is it helps the clay minerals bind to each other. And then when you spin these materials, so similar to say a washing machine on a spin cycle, they spin these fine tailings with this polymer added and you can extract water from these tailings. So reduce the water content, reduce the amount of fluid tailings. And there’s two benefits from that. First the centrifuge tailings behave more like a soil. So they’re still rich in clay particles but they are more of a solid. There’s less water there, so that can be used for reforming landscapes it can create trafficable surfaces. The other benefit of this technology is that we end up being able to recycle that water for re-use in the processing.
Dr. Lindsay’s research Chair includes funding for twelve graduate and undergraduate students.
Thanks today to SYNCRUDE
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I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
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Syncrude
Program Date: 2014-08-28