Environment Committee on May 12th, 2009

[Dr. Murray R. Gray]

We are collaborating. As I mentioned earlier, our centre has projects with the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and Queen's University. We hope within a few weeks to start a project at the University of Ottawa. I was down at Rice University in Houston last week talking about potential collaboration, and we've been talking with groups at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, about potential collaboration. So we're reaching out where we see particular expertise that we need to try to enlist in this enterprise.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Great.

I'm the member of Parliament for Kitchener--Waterloo. The University of Waterloo is in my riding, and I'm a little bit familiar with the great work they're doing there in the faculty of environment and the water institute. Do you think that the work Dr. George Dixon and Professor David Rudolph and others are doing would be of value for this committee to learn more about?

[Dr. Selma Guigard]

Yes.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

It was a rhetorical question. Thank you.

Let's touch on the reclamation process. Could you provide your assessment of the success of the reclamation process and any areas of improvement with respect to that sort of thing?

[Dr. Selma Guigard]

There's a lot of research going on in tailings reclamation basically looking at trying to get the tailings ponds to settle faster so we can reclaim. But the other issue in getting the tailings ponds to settle faster is that if they settle faster, they'll release more water, which we can then recycle. So there is a lot of work going on in that area.

There are two beliefs in terms of what a reclaimed tailings pond looks like. Does it look like a dry landscape where we can put in trees and restore the forest? Or is it a wet landscape where there could be a lake that could eventually be used? So there are those two different approaches, and there's a lot of debate about which approach is the better approach to be used.

I'm currently involved in the tailings project at the University of Alberta through the Alberta Water Research Institute. It is looking at accelerated tailings densification, if you will, to try to get more recycled water and to eventually reclaim the tailings.

So there's a lot of research going on in that area.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Very good.

[Dr. Murray R. Gray]

I was just going to add that I'm not an expert in this area at all, but for me as a Canadian, one of the key policy issues is what constitutes successful reclamation. This has been an area of huge debate. Does reclamation constitute putting the landscape back into a productive mode for recreation and other human activity, or does it constitute putting the landscape back to exactly the same way it was before?

I've seen criticism of reclaimed areas in the Fort McMurray area, because they're not going back to muskeg. Is that an issue or not? That's a policy issue.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

One more quick question, Mr. Braid.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

I'm just looking for a one-sentence answer on this next one. What's your vision of what the oil sands development should look like ten years from now?

[Dr. Murray R. Gray]

I would say no more tailings ponds. That would be my vision. If we could eliminate tailings ponds, that would transform the mining side of the industry completely. You would see much faster movement from mining to reclamation, and a much reduced area of land disturbance at any given time.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Great.

Mr. Calkins.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I certainly appreciate the testimony. I'm going to be quite quick and direct and focused in my questions.

Are you familiar with work that's now being done by Mr. Gradek, of Gradek Energy, insofar as a bipolymer bead designed to attract hydrocarbons and repel water is concerned? Do you know about that technology or where that's at?

[Dr. Selma Guigard]

I don't know where it's at. I've heard of it, and I know you will be talking to him tomorrow.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

I was just hoping to get some insight before we had that opportunity.

Obviously there's the work that you do in high-level research at the university level, and we talked about the next step, which is the applied research, taking the useful things you guys can do in the laboratory and extending that out into the field.

How far away is the next great leap in technology?

[Dr. Murray R. Gray]

If I look at the history of the industry, about the shortest cycle I've seen for implementing a transformative new technology has been in the range of five years, from initial conception through to the start of construction. So it's seven years or more from the initial idea through to being able to start a full-scale operation. That's the time scale.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

And that's going to require a lot of investment, obviously, and it's obviously going to involve the right decisions being made by policy-makers as far as approvals and permits to move forward with those new technologies are concerned, because with every new technology come new challenges—and new things, expected or unexpected, often come with that.

A question I have is about water usage. Is the water that comes out of the Athabasca River treated, or is it raw water that simply goes into the process and is heated up for the extraction process? Do you know?

[Dr. Selma Guigard]

I don't think it's treated. It's used for a number of different applications. The water that comes out of the Athabasca River is used for the extraction, but it's also used for the industrial or mining purposes as well.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

My understanding of the process is that no chemicals are really added into the process. Everything that we have in the tailings ponds, all the heavy metals, everything that we see in the tailings ponds, was actually naturally occurring. It either got pumped in through the process.... It was naturally occurring in the Athabasca River, or it was naturally occurring in the soils.

Is that true, or is there a chemical solvent, a diluent or something like that, that's added into the process we should know about?

[Dr. Murray R. Gray]

All of the technologies use solvent in treating the bitumen at one point of the process. So all of the tailings ponds contain solvents. In comparison with the naphthenic acid material, the solvents are readily biodegradable. So they pose a short-term environmental issue, but they don't have the kind of persistence in the environment that the naphthenic acid material has.

As for other chemicals that are added, some of the companies use sodium hydroxide or lye to adjust the pH to make the water less acidic, but that's a relatively benign additive. One company uses a citric acid, which is found in orange juice. So it's readily biodegradable.

So there are some additives used, but for the most part, they're less of a concern in terms of environmental impact than the acids that come out of the bitumen.

[Dr. Selma Guigard]

Some of these compounds, as Dr. Gray mentioned, are biodegradable, but this makes for some interesting challenges in the tailings ponds when they do biodegrade. We all think that these ponds are dead and there's nothing there, but micro-organisms exist everywhere, and they exist in those tailings ponds. And it's been noticed that with the addition of certain of these compounds, when the micro-organisms that actually exist in these tailings ponds are degrading, they produce gases. Some of these gases—such as methane, when it starts to be generated in the tailings ponds—actually help densification, so the tailings settle faster. However, you do have tailings ponds producing methane and some other gases.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We're going to have to move on to Mr. Watson now, for four minutes.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Vice-Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for appearing.

Maybe I missed this because I was writing a lot of notes down, but I want to come back to the number of barrels of water per barrel of bitumen in production. What is that total number again, and what is the split of freshwater versus recycled water?

[Dr. Selma Guigard]

The total amount of water is of the order of 12 to 13 barrels, as some of the publications suggest. Of that, about 80% to 90% is recycled. Syncrude, in their last sustainability report, published a figure of 88% recycled.

So if you take the 12 to 13 barrels and recycle 80% to 90% of that water, you will need some water to make up for what is still needed. That comes from the Athabasca River. It's about two to four and a half barrels.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Four and a half?

[Dr. Selma Guigard]

Yes. It depends. There is a large range out there right now. If you look at some of the recent sustainability reports, it's 2, 2.7, and 3, but it's been as high as 4.5 barrels.