Innovation Anthology #151: CEO and Co-Founder
When oil sands are processed to make oil,
two of the heavy metals that must be removed are nickel and vanadium.
While valuable in their own right, they can lead to pollution and contamination problems further down the production line.
But the present technology for removing these heavy metals is wasteful. Dr. Murray Gray is the Director of the Imperial Oil-Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Oil Sands Innovation.
DR. MURRAY GRAY: The current techniques are pretty crude. If you use a process called coking, you reject about 20 percent of the bitumen as a solid waste product. That contains all the metals, but you’ve lost 20 percent of your crude oil.
The other metal is to treat the crude oil with solvents and that removes 30 to 40 percent of the oil along with all the metals. So you can appreciate to remove a fraction of 1 percent of the oil, we’re currently throwing away 20 to 40 percent of the oil. We want to do things better.
Dr. Gray’s research is now focused on finding materials that might absorb these metals, releasing them from the bitumen without wasting any oil. Then nickel and vanadium can be recovered for sale, not lost as a contaminant.
Thanks today to Alberta Ingenuity
Learn more at InnovationAnthology.com.
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER.
Guest
Vaughan Payne,
Dakota Supplies Inc, Calgary, Alberta, Canada,
Sponsor
Alberta Ingenuity
Established in 2000, the Alberta Ingenuity Fund supports science and engineering research of the highest calibre, to create a prosperous future for the province of Alberta. It draws funding from a $1 billion endowment established in 2000 and managed by the Government of Alberta to build the capacity for innovation, especially in areas with long lasting social and economic impact.
Among its many programs, Alberta Ingenuity supports graduate students and university researchers, industrial research and commercialization partnerships, and has established several Centres and Institutes.
In January 2010, under the new Alberta Innovation Framework, Alberta Ingenuity was restructured and absorbed in the new agency Alberta Innovates Technology Solutions.
Program Date: 2008-07-15