Innovation Anthology #688:
Over the last few years, Syncrude has been testing a new technology using its leftover coke to filter toxins from process water.
You can think of it as a giant Brita filter.
Warren Zubot is a senior engineering associate with Syncrude.
As he explains, the test results are very encouraging.
WARREN ZUBOT: Oh, absolutely. The 2012 field pilot that we did actually confirmed the results that we saw in the lab. the results were actually better. Usually when you scale things up, there’s there’s issues with that. But the evidence that we’ve got to date suggests that as we scale up, the treatment performance gets better.
Warren Zubot is now planning a very large scale pilot to test the coke filtration
WARREN ZUBOT: It’s actually a fairly large pilot. It could be about a kilometer long cell. So we do need a significant amount of real estate. So we’re at the basic engineering stage, figuring out where its going to be, and doing the preliminary costing. We could just go into a mined out pit and do it in there, in which case we wouldn’t have to do any extra dike construction. But for a pilot activity, we’ve decided it will be an out of pit, which will require us to construct these dikes to do this.
According to Warren Zubot, the coke filtration produces clean water that supports aquatic life.
Thanks today to SYNCRUDE
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I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
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Sponsor
Syncrude
Program Date: 2015-05-12