#909: Dr Mohamed Gamal El-Din: Active & Passive Systems Reclaim Oil Sands Water

Working with Mother Nature is one of the cornerstones of Dr. Mohamed Gamal El-Din’s holistic approach to environmental engineering.

His work on waste water treatment for oil sands combines engineered solutions with natural processes – what he calls active and passive systems.

These include the use of end pit lakes, artificial wetlands and bio-filtration.

DR MOHAMED GAMAL EL-DIN:   For example, we could look at end pit lakes.  It’s engineered.  They are engineered at the beginning, supervised for awhile, and hopefully, eventually they can be independent.   But those end pit lakes, they might require some pretreatment, such as ozone, or advanced oxidation, this could be an approach.    Or maybe engineered wetlandsthat you can engineer and design them to be as efficient as you can based on the fundamentals of some  aspects of contaminant removal that we worked on in the first six years.  And then once they are designed and supervised for a short while, they can independent.   So these are all could be looked at as engineered passive systems.

Dr Gamal El-Din also suggests using bio-filtration through engineered soil systems to biologically reclaim oil sands water.