Innovation Anthology #648:
When it comes to reclaiming oil sands mines, hydro engineer Dr. Lee Barbour is looking for effective ways to measure how process water moves through the landforms and at what rate.
Having now developed a new catalogue of water isotopes, Dr. Barber is matching these with core samples.
And one instrument he’s using is called a cone penetration time domain reflectometry device,
DR. LEE BARBOUR So it’s essentially a steel rod with a steel tip on it that you drive down through the deposit. And then we’ve had a student who is just writing up and will defend shortly, work on a way of measuring the volume of water adjacent to that cone penetration. So if you drive it down, can you measure the volume of water stored in the formation? So now you have the volume. And if we can measure the stable isotope signature simply by sampling the gas phase that’s present adjacent to the probe, now you have the volume of water and you have the signature. And so now you can start to interpret that to get rates of water movement into the land form.
Dr. Lee Barbour hopes to scale up the cone penetration device from prototype to field model within the year.
Thanks today to SYNCRUDE
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
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Sponsor
Syncrude
Program Date: 2014-11-18