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94 comments on Tar Sands: The Oil Junkie's Last Fix, Part 2
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Would it be possible to use a passive filter to reclaim the toxic water, as in a solar distiller? Angled clear plastic or glass, some tubing, and whatever the sun supplies.
The wastewater problem is indeed huge, but it doesn't have to be as bad as it currently is. I would probably be correct in surmising that the composition of this wastewater is not unlike a combination of petroleum refining effluent and coal process wastewater.
As such, a variety of conventional wastewater treatment technologies could be applied to greatly improve the quality of this effluent. Coagulation and seettling followed by metals precipitation, sand filtration, and then some form of biological treatment, with perhaps a carbon adsorption 'polishing' step would probably effect at least a 97% removal of most the various chemical constituents.
Given the large volume of wastewater generated, such a treatment system would not be cheap, but it is technically doable. I am a bit surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't be) that the Canadian government didn't require some form of wastewater treatment to be in place even before the whole thing went into operation. In any event, some form of treatment is inevitable, as they cannot store this wastewater in ponds forever. And the longer they wait, the harder it is going to be, because they will not only have to treat the new wastewater as it is being generated, but also will have to work off the huge inventory of old wastewater accumulated in those ponds.
Even if a treatment system is 99% effective, the absolute pollutant loading in terms of lbs per day of the various chemical constituents will still be large and will still represent a considerable negative environmental impact on whatever receiving stream it is discharged to.
While they can make it not as bad, but they can never make it good.
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
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.
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
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.
It will never be cleaned up. What the businesses are doing is stockpiling the waste in holding ponds and piles; when the bonanza is over, they will claim they don't have the money to clean it up and/or go belly up and dissolve.
cfm in Gray, ME
"a solar distiller?"
Unfortunately, this is probably just wishful thinking. Alberta is rather closer to the pole than to the equator and solar is notably less effective there than is commonly thought.
My wishful thinking goes for heating using radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. Radioactive waste in suitably engineered containers can become quite hot from the radioactivity. Engineering problems that I can forsee are corrosive compounds in the water and in the radioactive waste eating away at the containers, leading to radioactive release into the environment.
I got back from Alaska a few weeks ago. You'd be quite surprised how much sunshine they get on the summer side of the year between the equinoxes. Granted, it's not Las Vegas hot, but it does shine for 19 hours per day.
Concentrate it, and there's the distiller.
Nice one geek! You have outdone sarcasm itself itself. We need a new word here, maybe make it out of 'corrosive sarcasm'...corsarc??
There's not enough direct sunlight that high in the artic, pus immense amounts of water. 6 barrels per barel of bitumen, and a barrel equals 42 gallons. So thats roughly 250 gallons of fresh water per barrel a day of production which is 1 million barrels of syncrude a day. My hand calculator is out of zeroes. Bob Ebersole
This is why I suggested the filter be "passive" and use "whatever the sun supplies". It's the cost of the setup, and no continuing energy costs, and runs unattended, and better than nothing.
You are probably assuming that a certain rate of evaporation needs to be achieved to be successful. Currently, the amount of captured evaporation is zero. Any amount of capture is infinite improvement compared to where we stand now.
Instead of angled glass, domed glass could be used to trap additional heat and increase the rate of evaporation.
Hand calculator? You mean you can't do that computation in your head? 252 million gallons of fresh water per day. What if passive evaporative reclamation could knock even half a percent off of that for less than the per-gallon cost of the current water supply?
Solar water distillation is slowwww. There is no way it could manage the amount of water we're talking about here, unless it were an installation occupying hundreds of acres (and addding significantly to the costs).
Various forms of water treatment are obviously possible, but there is absolutely zero impetus to require them--and I'd be willing to bet that if they were required, it would seriously put a crimp in the tiny profit realized by tar sands ops.
In any case, even if the water problem could be solved, it would still leave the natural gas problem. And the studies I've read that actually attempted to do the math on using nuclear instead have concluded unanimously that there is no way that the number of nuclear plants required to increase production signficantly, beyond what's possible with the available natural gas, would ever be built--not in the next few decades, anyway. Though I would entertain any references to serious studies (e.g., more than wild hand-waving) that show otherwise.
--Chris
Energy consultant, writer, blogger www.getreallist.com
So would I. Please link these "serious studies" you claim conclude nuclear-powered tar sands extraction is infeasible.
Providing documentation is not only for people who disagree with you.
No docs Doc, so this might not be fact at all, but I have been led to understand that a rather heavy duty electrical grid is necessary with nuclear plants for safety sake and that the prairies, even now, still have more grouse than gauss.
My perspective on the water issue probably won't be popular here, but I suspect I've read more about it and heard more presentations on it than most posters in this thread. Like Pitt the Elder, I also want to say up front that I'm not an apologist for development of the oil sands and that much of the development scenario bothers me.
That said, I take exception to the depiction of withdrawal in the water licencing diagram near the top of the key post. Yes, the oil sands industry is the largest user of fresh water in the basin. However, relatively speaking, that use is not large, a point missing from the discusssion. Here I'm going to quote a small section of text from the 2005 annual report of the multi-stakeholder group responsible for something called the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program, an effort supervised by Alberta Environment partly to provide a scientific basis for discussions like the one we're having here. The full report can be downloaded from http://www.ramp-alberta.org/archive.php.