The Oil Drum

94 comments on Tar Sands: The Oil Junkie's Last Fix, Part 2

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dragonfly on September 9, 2007 - 12:30pm

Hello everybody. Has anyone seen evidence that the oil industry invests anything at all in order to pilot test and foster development of the technologies they need in order to solve the crucial water problem? I somehow doubt that this is an active area of industry investment. If a technology were proven, then the industry would experience pressure to actually use it. Without adequate technology, it is easier to make the argument to simply release the polluted water back into the rivers, or to create huge artificial lakes full of polluted water

Below is a reference to an article on research done by Sandia National Laboratories, on the bench scale, on a technology, called capacitive deionizatsion, to handle a similiar water problem, produced water from Coal Bed Methane. Worthwhile technologies like this are well documented to exist, but have received insufficient pilot testing. Competent due diligence has also been lacking. To date, the state of New Mexico paid for a small pilot to test this particular technology for arsenic remediation.

http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag/40/i03/html/020106tech.htm...

Sandia's website on this new technology, called capacitive deionization, may be found at

http://www.sandia.gov/water/desal/research-dev/alternative-tech.html

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joule on September 9, 2007 - 2:40pm

dragonfly -

As a (retired) environmental engineer, I would have to say that treating the wastewater from tar sand operations to an acceptable level does not require any exotic new technology, but rather the application of existing best available treatment technology, based thorough pilot testing and good engineering design.

The problem, of course, is that currently nobody is making them do anything other than hold the wastewater in giant earthen impoundments. As I said, this practice cannot go on forever, and eventually some form of treatment will be required. The situation reminds me of US industry in the early 1970s: if a gun was not held to their heads to install pollution control systems, it just wouldn't happen.

I suspect that the area where some real innovation can be applied is treated wastewater recycle. I don't know enough about the tar sand process to be specific, but I would think that for some of the operations water quality is not that critical and might be successfully served by (partially) recycled wastewater. As water availability appears to be one of the limiting factors in Alberta tar sand operations, I would think that there should be a strong incentive to explore wastewater recycle possibilities.

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dragonfly on September 9, 2007 - 3:38pm

Thank you for the comment. One would think that what you say is true, that there would be a strong incentive to explore waste water recycle opportunities. Howevr, I don't see much evidence that industry has agressively or even non agressively, pursued opportunities to innovate here.

A key technical concern when recycling waste water is the rapid build up of salinity, removal of which becomes the limiting step. Therefore, not only does salinity ( and "t.d.s.", total dissolved solids) need to be removed, but it needs to be done with high water recovery, in order to maintain the aim of saving water. Technologies that treat t.d.s are few, and tend to be older than the alphabet. Use of any existing technologies in order to achieve high recoveries with produced water, which is likely to have compounds that would tend to foul water treatment systems, would in and of itself be an experiment.
Therefore, any technology would be a new technology when used under these conditions. Some of the older technologies, such as R.O ,have been tested to death., while promising new technologies have received insufficient or incompetent due diligence

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joule on September 9, 2007 - 6:25pm

Generally, salinity build-up only becomes a problem when one goes to very 'tight' recycle systems.

I would venture that if the tar sands process can use recycled wastewater at all, it would probably be able to tolerate at least a 75 percent recycle rate, which would reduce net water consumption by a factor of about four.

However, once one tries to tighten up the wastewater recycle much beyond that point, various problems with salinity, corrosion, scaling, bio deposits, etc. can rear their ugly head.

I think that given the critical water supply situation in the Alberta tar sands, wastewater recycle is an area well worth exploring.