Innovation Anthology #177: CEO

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Armed with new found knowledge from scientists researching boreal wetlands, Syncrude Canada is attempting to do something no one has tried before.

And that’s to reconstruct a fen after mining for oil sands. Unlike bogs which get their water from precipitation, the hydrology of a fen depends on ground water.

This provides numerous challenges for environmental scientist Clara Qualizza and her colleagues as they try to turn oil sands tailings into a peat forming landscape.

CLARA QUALIZZA: So we’re designing what the stratigraphy of the uplands and the material underneath the wetlands will be. We have this type of tailing sand. Should we make it coarser? Should we add some finer material to it to allow the water to move through it easier or to block it? How do we drape the soils and connect them into the wetlands because the idea of water moving uphill is about the trees and the upland extending their roots and taking through the soil and taking the water out of the wetlands.

Qualizza’s team hopes to transplant blocks of peat from natural fens to enhance the revegetation process. The experimental fen should be finished in 2010.

Thanks today to Syncrude Canada.

I’M CHERYL CROUCHER

Guest

Laura Kilcrease,

Alberta Innovates, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada,

Sponsor

Syncrude

Program Date: 2008-10-21