Environment Committee on May 12th, 2009

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

There's no water?

[Thomas Gradek]

The water and sand are clean, and the bitumen is extracted. We take maximum advantage of all the resources: we've increased bitumen extraction and improved water quality. Thus we enable them to reclaim the site immediately because the soil is clean and can be used for vegetation. It's a clean habitat. For example, the Pointe-Calumet sand pit has become an aquatic park. The only difference between the two places is the bitumen.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

Merci, Mr. Ouellet.

Ms. Duncan, you have seven minutes.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Acting Chair. You're doing a great job.

I have a question for either Dr. Kasperski or Dr. Hamza.

I found your presentations very interesting. You can correct me if I'm following it wrong, but as I understand it, particularly from your handout, page 7, you're saying that the reason we have the system we have now for dealing with the tailings and tailings ponds is because that's the science that the consortium put together and that's what they decided to proceed with.

How long has it been that we've had better technologies but they're not being required to be taken up by the companies?

[Dr. Hassan Hamza]

First of all, the statement, if I can just say it again, is that the lack of science at the beginning caused the situation where there was underestimation of the size required for the tailings ponds. When you put the tailings in tailings ponds, the fluid tailings stay in the pond for a very long time before they compact. So they needed more and more tailing ponds.

It may not have been expressed very well here, but the lack of science at the beginning in understanding the clays, rather than the fines, created that.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

My question was, how long have we known that?

[Dr. Hassan Hamza]

I'm coming to that. I'm sorry, I just wanted to set that straight first.

We have been working in this area for maybe twelve years or so. You have visited the oil sands and seen how large they are. It is very difficult to move all that huge machinery. So we have worked with the industry since that time to convince them to try new technologies. They started with this consortium. They started implementing consolidated tailings, adding some gypsum and so on to it to make it more trafficable and get the water out quickly. Suncor started using it in one or two applications. They had to give it a couple of years before they could evaluate the results to see if it works or not. Actually, in this case it works very well. There were some problems, but they worked on the problems. Syncrude had started doing that also. So this was one technology.

But since then we've come up with two or three technologies, and one of them is, I would say, close to commercialization. It is in the field now. It's called dry stackable tailings. But dry is a misnomer. It's not really dry; it still has about 15% water in it. But you can drive a Caterpillar and things like that on it, which is the criterion for that.

So we have been working with them for quite a while. We have been publishing for quite a while, because this is the influence we have. We can influence what's going on by publishing in the general--

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

I'm sorry, I have to intervene here, because it's a bit long and I don't have very much time.

I'm trying to draw a line in the sand. It sounds like you've been working for quite some time on developing better technologies. But do new technologies become utilized only because you persuade the companies, or is there a role for government to say that they must now use these technologies? That's what I'm trying to get an answer on.

[Dr. Kim Kasperski]

There are two main drivers. One is the government coming down with new directives saying they must do this, that they must accomplish this amount of fines capture by this year to produce this kind of trafficable solid. That has happened with the Alberta government. Also, the companies are driven by themselves because they're running out of space to put all this stuff. So they have their own internal drivers to reduce the sheer size of these ponds, because they don't have anywhere else to put it.

So there's the economic driver of their own self-interest, and then there is the provincial directive that's saying they must meet certain requirements for, especially, the fluid fine tailings capture.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Am I understanding correctly that it's the same with the coal-fired cooling ponds, or the discharge ponds? They're running out of space, so they're being allowed to make them go up because they can't go out any more. The stackable tailings simply mean that we're building up; we're not reducing the amount of tailings.

[Dr. Kim Kasperski]

Dry stackable means that you don't need containment. It means you can put them anywhere; they will not flow. You can then reclaim the areas if you have this solid surface. That's the difference between that and the tailings ponds, where you have to contain them. With dry stackable, the definition is that you don't need a containment system.

In terms of what you said about their just going higher, to do that they need sand, and often that's an issue. They just don't have enough sand to build up these dikes higher and higher. It's a numbers game. It's a very complex system they have to manage. There's the amount of sand they need to build dikes. They don't have enough sand. They're running out of area. So they need another method. Hence, they're going to the technologies that--

[Dr. Hassan Hamza]

If I can add one thing, the dry stackable tailings have only 15% water left. The other tailings have much more than that. The tailings in the tailings ponds have 75% water. So having only 15% water in the tailings is great.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

I have one final question, if I have time.

I've read some of your papers, and I think some might be yours, jointly written, Dr. Kasperski. I was given a number of papers by the Alberta government. As I understand, there's a dichotomy, because there's a competition between removing the water and getting more bitumen out. Am I correct? There's a kind of competition between better technologies to reclaim and better technologies to profit more by taking more bitumen out.

Am I not understanding that?

[Dr. Kim Kasperski]

Not really. It was something Dr. Hamza mentioned earlier. Anything you do to the tailings to improve water recovery--and one that was commercially applied was adding calcium sulphate to the system to improve water recovery and, ultimately, reclamation. Unfortunately, the extra calcium could hurt recovery, so they have to make sure they add the correct amount, that the recycled water doesn't kill recovery or scale up the plant and shut everything down.

So there's always that issue of what you do to treat the tailings to get more water back. You do not want it to have a deleterious effect on bitumen recovery. So that's why they're looking at different methods.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

Thank you, Ms. Duncan.

The first round of questioning from the Conservatives was to go to Mr. Warawa.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Thank you for your good work, Chair, on the environment and for suggesting some of these very interesting witnesses to be before us today. That was a shameless promotion of your good work, Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses so much for being here.

I'm going to start with Mr. Gradek. I'm trying to grasp this technology. It seems so simple, and I'm bewildered as to why this hasn't been commercialized yet. You said you've been working on this for 14 years, that you've been working with the University of Alberta. We had Dr. Murray Gray with us this morning, Dr. Selma Guigard, and Dr. Schindler. Have you worked with any of these people? I think that when I was asking Drs. Gray and Guigard about coming technologies, that was not mentioned. Have you been working with any of the industries in the oil sands? Could you elaborate?

Page 8 of your handout shows a brief on the process. My understanding, and what we've heard in other testimony, is that you have a problem with getting the clay out of the water. You can remove the bitumen, but the clay will stay suspended in the tailing water for years, maybe 30 or 40 years, and that's what makes it so difficult. In your demonstration, you're suggesting the beads are picking up the bitumen and the clay, because when they run through the process it says clay and other fine particles are separated from the bitumen-coated beads.

Is the clay also removed from the water so you end up with clean water?

[Thomas Gradek]

Those jars I brought probably are the best visual explanation you can get that the clays and the sand will not adhere to the bitumen coating, and that's because of the minimum free energy level of the bitumen on the bead. There's not enough energy in the hydrocarbon coating to adhere to the soil particles. You have an interfacial surface tension factor of about 33 dynes per centimetre for sand to bitumen, or clay to bitumen. Bitumen to our bead is 13 dynes per centimetre. That discrepancy of 20 dynes per centimetre is energy that was released by the hydrocarbon into the system. So at 13 it won't stick to the hydrocarbon coating on the bead.

Next, the water that was in one of the jugs that was shaken around is getting pretty well clear. That takes one hour, natural decanting, which is a 50-year term in the tailings pond at Mildred Lake. There's a huge difference. If you remove all the hydrocarbons you alter the zeta potential on the clay particles. They can agglomerate and they settle. You don't have to add chemicals, no flocs whatsoever.

The real component here that is making a mess of the tailings is the hydrocarbon component. If you remove it, you now have something that's very easy to work with that you have in waste water treatment system plants. People know how to deal with flocs and clays and sand. It's standard procedure.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Mr. Chair, I could imagine these beads for spills. It's the same principle.

[Thomas Gradek]

Oil spills, exactly.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

If you've been working on this for 14 years, why have we not seen it used yet? We've heard about adding gypsum to the water to help the clay settle up. If the industry has been trying all these different things over the last number of years, why are we not hearing about your beads being used?

[Thomas Gradek]

Industry is starting to take a serious look at external technologies that they are not developing themselves within their corporate structure. They like to own the technologies that they use.

Secondly, they have a certain scaling-up process. When you take a technology from an incubation stage and ramp it up to a commercial deployment stage, you have to be able to handle large volumes. That's material handling, and those are engineering design issues. You have to make those steps. That is a standard procedure, and it's very hard to circumvent that and say, “I've got it in a test tube. Now it's going to work on a 48-inch pipeline.” A lot of things can go wrong.

This is why. It's a procedure that takes time. You have to demonstrate it, prove it out, see how robust the process is, because the greater the size, the more problems can crop up.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

When we did our flyover, we saw tailings ponds and we could see a bit of steam coming from part of the tailings pond. That was the inlet where the warm water was being put into the tailings pond.

Are you dealing with this before the water gets into the tailings pond so that it's part of the process and you're able to then recover the actual heat?

[Thomas Gradek]

Yes. What we intend to do, on the tailings stream at the end of the pipe, between the plant and the tailings pond, is set up an off-line facility that would take in that tailings stream. It's very hot. It's about 75°C, 80°C. Some streams are 50°C to 60°C. There's a lot of heat there that we don't require.

In striving to clean up the tailings ponds that exist, we have to raise that temperature. So why not use this excess heat from the tailings stream and blend it with tailings pond sludge to reach our temperature, so we don't add any energy into the system, we're not burning fuel and generating CO₂ emissions and so on, and use that in our process starting at 40°C? When the water comes out of our process, it's at about 38°C, so it's quite warm and it's suitable to be put back into the extraction process up front.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

That would result, then, in less energy being needed to heat up the water for extraction.

[Thomas Gradek]

Correct.