Innovation Anthology #637:
Chemical oxidation and ozone treatment hold promise in treating oil sands tailings water.
That’s according to the research of Dr. Mohamed Gamal El-Din and his team.
Dr. Gamal El-Din holds the NSERC Senior Industrial Research Chair in Oil Sands Tailings Water Treatment at the University of Alberta.
DR MOHAMED GAMAL EL-DIN: Actually we did a lot of projects for basically degrading some of the constituents in the oil sands process water that are quite recalcitrant, that stay in the environment for a long time before they even get degraded to some extent. So we were able to actually use some of the chemical treatments, specifically using ozone treatment, for accelerating the degradation of these compounds. Once they are degraded into other by-products, these other by-products are now amenable for biological degradation in different treatment systems. So this could accelerate the whole reclamation approach of the oil sands process water. And this work done using ozone has been proven quite efficient and with a great potential to be used one day in the reclamation strategies by the oil sands companies.
Dr. Gamal El-Din says the challenge with ozone treatment is to design more efficient systems that use less energy.
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I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
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Program Date: 2014-09-16