Vendors Find Niches in Northern Alberta for Helpful Microbes and Massive Boilers
Opportunity abounds in the oil sands for the smart salesman
Call Alberta discovered – everywhere.
“We read about the tailings ponds,” said Dutch-born James Wrubel, who trekked across the continent this summer from his adopted New York home on Long Island to the oil province. “We read about the birds. We read about the tremendous growth of the oil sands.”
But he did not make his pilgrimage to stage a Greenpeace publicity stunt, trespassing on Syncrude property and unfurling a protest banner recalling the spring episode of tailings pond duck deaths.
Wrubel is a merchant of industrial chemicals. For him, environmental accidents, popular pressure to prevent further mishaps, and advances in cleanup materials add up to opportunities. He described Alberta, with its vast arrays of containers for hazardous materials and their potential for harmful spills or leaks, as ripe for a European product like the one his EcoSolutions International LLC is introducing to North America. “We love tanks,” he said.
The item is a super-food for micro-organisms that occur everywhere on the planet and acts as an active agent in biodegrading waste into harmless or useful materials. The magic formula, a Dutch invention, vastly accelerates the natural biodegrading process by triggering rapid growth and reproduction of organisms into voracious packs that dine out on cleanup targets.
“Feed them and they eat hydrocarbons,” Wrubel said in an enthusiastic sales pitch made repeatedly at an oil sands industrial trade fair held in Calgary by the Oklahoma-based PennWell technical publishing and show network.
“They die when they’re full. After they clean up a mess, you’re left only with some dead biomass, water and a minute amount of carbon dioxide that they breathed out while they were alive,” Wrubel said.
“The micro-organisms that don’t eat just die. They don’t get out of control.” The super-food has no effect on larger life forms, he added. “You can wash your hands with the stuff.”
The product is used in about 80 per cent of Dutch fire extinguishers and routinely sprayed on blazes or fuel spills at road accidents, Wrubel reported.
Claims for the nutrient also include that it does a tidier, safer job of cleaning toxic oily materials off birds or other wildlife than liquid dishwasher soap currently donated to rescue crews by major manufacturers. Conventional detergent is 17 per cent alcohol and leaves a residue on victims of environmental accidents, Wrubel said.
The product initially emerged from research commissioned by textile manufacturers, he reported. European mills were looking for a cleaning method for looms that would prevent machinery parts, lubricants and maintenance from leaving grease or oil stains on cloth.
“Unfortunately the textile industry largely left for Mexico, India and China,” Wrubel said. But the special nutrient for the microscopic agents of biodegrading was not forgotten. “It was tweaked for the oil industry.”
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