Innovation Anthology #732:
Dr. Lee Barbour is a professor of engineering at the University of Saskatchewan.
He holds an NSERC Syncrude Industrial Research Chair on a very complicated topic – the hydrogeology of Mine Closure Landforms for the Oil Sands Industry.
In his recent address to Syncrude management and researchers, Dr Barbour posed several questions about the environmental significant of water moving through the reconstructed landscapes.
DR LEE BARBOUR: The second question I asked them was, do you eat only the apple skin? If you take the thickness of the apple skin to the size of the apple, it’s a very good parallel to the size of a reclamation cover to the size of the dump material you’re essentially reclaiming. And so my point was, to understand water throughout your landscape, you also have to know the volumes and the migration of water deep within your landscapes. Most of these mine sites, you’ve disturbed or removed material down to depths of 80 meters or so. And so consequently the water stored within your landscape isn’t what you see necessarily just in surface ponds. It’s through the full depth of these materials.
Dr Barbour says knowing where the water is in the reconstructed landscape is critical to understanding the environmental risks of its release.
Thanks today to SYNCRUDE
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
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Sponsor
Syncrude
Program Date: 2015-11-17