#923: Mal Carroll: Patent for “Spin Dryer” Centrifuge System

Mal Carroll is the General Manager of Research and Development at Syncrude.

This year the oil sands company received a patent for its centrifuge system.

This acts as a giant spin dryer to remove water from fluid fine tailings.  That’s material leftover from the production of bitumen.

MAL CARROLL:   Essentially it takes fluid fine tails, you add a gypsum to the fluid fine tails and then you centrifuge it in a number of centrifuges that essentially accelerate the FFT and pulls the water out of the FFT mechanically. And once it goes through the process, what’s produced is what we call a cake.  So it’s more of a dense mud that we would place within our pit.  And then once we finish placing it, we would cap that cake with a material that allows then to start our reclamation process.  The benefit of the FFT centrifuge is that it accelerates this process and will allow to reclaim our land much faster than we had in the past.  

Mal Carroll says the centrifuge technology is now in full scale commercial use at Syncrude’s oil sands plant near Fort McMurray.