#924: Mal Carroll: Developing Base Mine Lake

Reclamation is the fourth stream of research and development at Syncrude.

One pilot project at the oil sands site is the creation of Base Mine Lake.

As Mal Carroll explains, this is a spent mine pit which has been capped with processed clays and filled with water to create a lake.

Mal Carroll is Syncrude’s General Manager of Research and Development.

MAL CARROLL:  Our latest focus has been on the turbidity of the lake.  It’s important that you have clear water so that the light can penetrate the lake and the aquatic ecosystem can start to develop.  So Fluid fine tails, of course, leaves residual cloudiness in the lake. We identified a chemical called alum which is used in water treatment as a chemical we could use to help us flocculate the fine clays that we have in the lake and then allow them to settle faster.  So we deployed this technology last summer and the alum then reacted with the clays in the lake and it cleared very, very quickly, in fact.

According to Mal Carroll, plants and insects are inhabiting the shoreline, but there’s still more work to do before fish are introduced.