Oil sands consortium members tackle growing tailings problem by pooling IP

Range of technologies being developed

Canada's largest oil sands producers have agreed to share intellectual property (IP) for technologies they're developing to reduce and clean wet tailings generated during surface mining as part of a new consortium that promises to inject at least $90 million annually into R&D. Announced last December and officially launched in April, the Oil Sands Tailings Consortium (OSTC) is spearheading what appears to be a new era of cooperation and collaboration that will soon generate a sister consortium devoted to water and land reclamation.

The OSTC is intended to accelerate the application of technologies for reducing and eventually eliminating long-term storage of fluid tailings that have captured negative headlines and increased public concern over the environmental damage of oil sands extraction. Since production began in earnest, the industry has spent approximately $400 million on tailings R&D. But the pace of R&D by Alberta's major oil sands operators have increased in recent years, largely due to Directive 74 — 2009 legislation that sets reduction targets for tailings and holds operators accountable for tailings management.

Approved by the Energy Resources Board of Alberta, Directive 74 stipulates that operators must submit plans for dedicated disposal areas and submit annual compliance reports. The legislation puts pressure on companies, which are normally highly competitive, to collaborate on developing and deploying the hundreds of technologies in the pipeline for reducing the amount of tailings and their impact on the environment.

"We're working together already. In mid-March there was a two-and-a-half day retreat with a high-level sharing of the work we do on tailings," says Dr Alan Fair, a 32-year veteran with Syncrude who retired in June to become the OSTC's executive director. "The challenge for me is not a technical one but one of managing expectations. We're not going to get rid of tailings but we will have fewer. They'll be smaller and we'll reclaim land faster."

With an annual operating budget of $1.2 million, OSTC is co-located with the Canadian Oil Sands Network form Research and Development (CONRAD) at Alberta Innovates - Technology Futures. It also maintains another office at the Univ of Alberta. As OSTC is not a legal entity, it relies on CONRAD for back-end support and for signing legal contracts. (OSTC does not maintain a web site and CONRAD has one under construction).

While R&D collaboration and technology deployment are the end goals of the consortium, the process of getting seven companies to agree to terms and conditions and research projects was long and arduous.

"It was a coalition of the willing that recognized we need more R&D for oil sands research. I was already doing this at Syncrude, especially in environmental areas," says Fair. "There were a lot of lawyers in the room so it was often painful. It was a struggle to put the IP aside. Since then we have held five workshops (a sixth was held September 22) and other initiatives. We want to get everyone up to speed to share information and data."

OSTC will oversee and coordinate three types of projects:

* independent projects by companies, the results of which will be shared with other companies. Several of these projects are already underway;

* joint co-funded projects involving two or more companies; and,

* common pool projects in which all seven companies have an interest and will share funding equally. These are more generic in nature will be managed by Fair.

Fair says about 450 different ideas have been boiled down to 135 involving a range of technologies. OSTC will priorize the technologies and funding.

"It's all about the deposits. You can only go so far in the lab, then you need to go into the field. It can cost between $10 million and $15 million for a summer-long field test. We'll be doing a commercial demonstration next year," says Fair. "Each company will not contribute equally. There are different types and sizes of companies in the consortium but each must contribute equitably and a company can be ejected if they don't."

"While operators have applied fluid tailings reduction technologies, they have not met the targets set out in their applications; as a result, the inventories that require long-term containment have grown. With each successive application and approval, public concerns have grown." — Directive 74

OSTC will also have access to the Oil Sands Tailing Research Facility, a research centre owned by the Univ of Alberta and sponsored by CONRAD. Based at CANMET Energy Technology Centre in Devon, 40 km north of Edmonton, the facility employs U of A researchers, Masters and PhD students and receives matching funds from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

Industry players have also funded a $1.9-million tailings roadmap study with matching funds coming from the federal and provincial governments. The study will be completed in the first quarter of 2012. While skills training is not an explicit component of the OSTC mandate, Fair says collaboration between industry players and academic-based researchers will boost the talent flow to companies. An added bonus is the leverage factor of collaborating with researchers who bring their own funding sources, stretching private sector dollars even further. There are two industrial research chairs focused on tailings research at the Univ of Alberta and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.

A key player in tailings R&D is Natural Resources Canada which operates the CANMET laboratories in Devon. Research is focused on the development and implementation of dry stackable tailings and consolidated tailings that will allow heavy equipment to be transported across the tailings.

Another consortium for water and land reclamation for both surface and in situ oil sands mining will announced in the near future. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is behind the new consortium. CAPP did not return calls for comment.

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