Richard Paproski, a research chemist at the facility, says it’s all about purifying froth, the initial result of separating bitumen from sand with Clark’s process. “The first step is the extraction, to get most of the bitumen off the oil sands, Paproski explains. The second step is froth treatment to improve the quality of the froth, so that it can be used as bitumen for upgrading. “We add naphtha as part of our froth treatment process, so the froth comes off the top of the extracting vessel and then we’ll dilute it with naphtha. Bitumen is still very viscous when heated. To get the last of the solids and water out, it helps to reduce viscosity and it’s less of a barrier to remove the water and the solids from the froth.”

Finding a cheaper yet effective way to do this is what the research is all about, Paproski says. “When you hit it with more energy – a centrifuge – you have the ability to get things done faster.” If gravity alone is relied upon, “It takes a bit more time for the separation process to occur. We’re still evaluating it and, hopefully, it will work out well and it’s something we can implement sometime in the future. But at this stage, we’re not 100 per cent sure that it’s going to be a reliable way of working for us.”

The naphtha bitumen thinner, by the way, is recovered from the froth and recycled. “You don’t want a high hydrocarbon load in your tailings,” Paproski says.

Generally, research has made the extraction process more efficient and less of a strain on the environment, he says. “We don’t need as much hot water and using the hydro-transport line, something that’s been adopted, has helped to reduce our energy usage for extraction.” The hydro-transport technology is, essentially, a pipeline that carries slurry from the mine to froth treatment facilities in a closed system.

“We’re always looking at reducing our freshwater use,” Paproski adds. “Recently our recycle rate for water that’s used on the plant site is much higher than 80 per cent – and in some cases approaching 90 per cent,” he says. “We recycle as much as we can and the water we actually withdraw from the river is primarily used in our cooling towers and for making steam for utilities. It doesn’t go directly into our extraction process. Most of that water comes from processed water from our ponds. Essentially, we need those tailings ponds as a source of water for our extraction process.”

Robb says the research centers on understanding and analysis, whether it is related to efficiencies of bitumen extraction or understanding exactly what components and compounds are present in the oil and the tailings.

What Robb calls the CSI area of the building is crammed with computers, microscopes and testing equipment that can analyze anything from clay samples to the wear and tear on equipment used in the extraction system. Opening a drawer, she pulls out a piece of worn metal tube. It’s a nozzle from an injector that’s seen better days. Researchers at the facility designed a better nozzle that lasts longer, she says. If it lasts longer, efficiency has been gained in the operation.

Even the operators’ seats in the mining operation’s iconic heavy-hauler trucks have been made more ergonomic. A million-dollar electron microscope that can peer at metal parts at 100,000-times enlargement can show microscopic monkey wrenches getting into the works and fouling equipment, while a plasma flame, sparked by radio frequencies, can identify the exact components of water or oil by analyzing their light patterns.

Research, and resulting Syncrude actions, are an oil sands story that’s never been fully told, Robb says. Essentially, environmental critics don’t have the whole story, she adds. “We’re the first to admit that. I think with the way Alberta’s oil sands have been developed, for the longest time Alberta had to prove to the world it was a viable source of oil. We kind of accomplished that in the early ’90s and then there was a gap in information. We spent so many years saying this is a viable, economic source of energy. And then when we did that, we stopped talking.”

When popular talk turned from investment and growth prospects to environmental issues, Syncrude was caught short, she says. “We didn’t answer that conversation early enough. We’re playing a little bit of catch-up now, trying to provide the information about what we’ve been doing over the years, because it’s not like we all of a sudden said, ‘Oh, my goodness, we have to reclaim, we have to manage our tailings.’ It’s just that we didn’t tell people what we were doing soon enough when people wanted to know.”

Syncrude doesn’t deny its oil sands operations affect the environment. “Like everything in our world, there’s impact,” Robb says. “No matter what you do, if you’re a human, you have impact. From our perspective, we want to minimize the amount of impact we have and then be able to manage those impacts and, with the reclamations, restore what we take away.”

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