Environment committee  Heavy metals are often associated with solids. Consequently, if heavy metals wind up in the rivers, they'll be found in river sediments.

Environment committee  There are some developments that are happening in the lab, looking at waterless extraction technologies, for example. You might have seen some of the work that I've been doing in looking at a waterless extraction process. We've been working on that in the lab. And I've seen some

Environment committee  I would say that's a difficult question to answer, because when we do research and development, it's just that, research and development, and all of those things that are tested in the lab and work in the lab might not work when we go up to pilot scale. For example, there are tec

Environment committee  I know a little bit about in situ, but not as much as some of my work, which is on surface mining.

Environment committee  That's what they call the “CT”, or composite tailings, process. They've been investigating it for several years now. There are problems with the quality of the recycled water. There are very high levels of calcium—because they're adding gypsum—that have caused problems in the ext

Environment committee  This is actually a question for a toxicologist, I'd say, an environmental toxicologist.

Environment committee  What you saw were the seepage dikes and the channels around the tailings ponds to capture any of the seepage. These tailings ponds are not lined, so systems are in place to capture any seepage and return it to the tailings ponds. A study out of the University of Waterloo is looki

Environment committee  As far as I understand it, we don't have a clear understanding, from an analytical point of view, whether there is or not.

Environment committee  Right now the science and engineering, as far as I understand it, is looking at the analytical technologies to measure naphthenic acids. As the name implies, naphthenic acids are a group of acids. There's a lot of research going into developing analytical techniques that are sens

Environment committee  The water is still going into the tailings ponds, but they are investigating technologies to treat that water to get a sufficiently good quality for extraction. So they have been using that, but they've noticed that the quality.... With the CT process--and I'm not sure how many y

Environment committee  I think.... I'm not sure.

Environment committee  The technology that I'm using is called supercritical fluid extraction, which has been used on a lab scale to extract bitumen from oil sands successfully. Right now we're looking at carbon dioxide. It uses carbon dioxide at about 40 degrees and at relatively high pressure. It a

Environment committee  That's the big challenge.

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  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