Royal Dutch Shell Plc announced Thursday that it will begin commercial demonstrations of its new equipment designed to reduce waste pools that are created by Canada’s oil sands extraction industry. It also confirmed that the new tech will be made available for competitors as well.
Shell executives have said, however, that it is still not certain if the new technology will be up to standard with a new directive outlined by the Alberta government. The waste pools, known in the industry as tailing ponds, are a mixture of silt, sand and the residual oil leftover from using hot water to separate the sand from the crude petrol. Without the use of technology, the ponds take hundreds of years to evaporate.
The oil sands industry has been working to stunt the growth of tailing ponds as they are the most noticeable sign of the processes damage on the environment. In Northeast Alberta, the pools cover an area of more than 50 sq miles and have been forecasted to grow should the industry do nothing.
The new tech, dubbed the Atmospheric Fines Drying, utilises a thickening agent mixed with flocculants to expedite the solidification of the waste material. The solid waste is then rolled down the slopes to remove the water. Water is then funneled back into the oil sands procedure.
The demonstration project will be run at Shell’s own mine in Muskeg River and is expected to effectively dry out 250,000 metric tons of pond tailings by the end of the year. However, that figure is just a small percentage of the waste tailings that the facility will actually produce. However, Shell says the results of the pilot will allow the company to further develop the technology making it more effective.
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