Alberta government commits $50M to bolster tailings pond reclamation technology
The Alberta government has announced a $50-million Tailings Technology Challenge, a funding competition that aims to drive the development of technologies that reduce oilsands mine water and help reclaim tailings ponds.
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The awarded funds will range from $1 million to $15 million, with the award accounting for no more than 50 per cent of an application's total budget.
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'Like all of our funding, the private sector has to be at the table and always do, often by far more than our minimum requirement,' said Justin Riemer, the CEO of Emissions Reduction Alberta, the organization in charge of allocating the funds. Riemer said the criteria are intentionally broad. Water treatment, tailing mitigation, and improved monitoring systems are all eligible in the competition.
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Frank Gu hopes to be one of the selected applicants. He is a chemistry professor at the University of Toronto, and has been researching tailings for a decade. He is also the co-founder of H2nanO, a company currently developing solar-powered floating materials to purify tailing water.
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Gu sees the tailings pond problem as twofold given the water's complexity and the sheer scale of the issue.
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The province's tailings ponds currently contain 1.4 billion cubic metres of fluid tailings and more than 390 thousand cubic metres of water, according to Rebecca Schulz, Alberta's minister of environment.
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'Collecting more and more water, with no end in sight, is not sustainable. We don't believe it's sustainable, and the companies don't believe it is sustainable,' Schulz said.
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'The vast majority of the components in there, if not the majority, are not harmful to wildlife,' Gu said. 'So the challenging part is, how do you separate the piece that needs to be treated? But at this moment, there's no federal or provincial regulation in place to say what needs to be treated, or what to target.'
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That problem is compounded by the wide differences between each pond. Sites age with their own environments over time, making each tailings pond unique, and the challenges they represent unable to be generalized.
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