By Sarah Ligon

If you’ve been to the pump recently, there’s a chance you’re driving around with a piece of northern Alberta in your tank. For the past 40 years, since Suncor opened its first processing plant outside of Fort McMurray in 1967, some 470 square kilometres that were once Alberta’s boreal forests have been cleared off, scooped up, separated and refined into the light sweet crude our society runs on. Interestingly, the hot water process for separating the valuable bitumen from the “worthless” oil sand was pioneered at the University of Alberta in 1926 by Karl A. Clark, a campus-based researcher for the Alberta Research Council and later a professor of mining and metallurgy.

Since then, the process itself has been refined and upgraded so that daily output now exceeds a million barrels of oil per day (bbl/d) and is expected to reach 3.5 million bbl/d in the next decade. When you consider that for every barrel of oil sands oil that reaches the pump, over two tonnes of earth have been dug up and processed, then more of the earth’s surface is being altered in northern Alberta than at any other place or time in history.

Given the scale of the enterprise, the industry’s environmental footprint is impossible to ignore; however, for years environmentalists had been sounding the alarm and celebrities staging fly-over campaigns without ruffling too many feathers. Then came the ducks. In April of 2008, more than 1,600 migrating ducks died after landing on an oil sands tailing pond, and this remote corner of northern Alberta finally had the world’s full attention — and its scrutiny. In the months that followed, several prominent international media outlets published scathing critiques, including a 20-page cover story in the March 2009 issue of National Geographic, and the death of the ducks became a rallying point for activists who said “dirty” oil was taking too great a toll on the environment. Mike Hudema, ’00 BEd, ’05 LLB, an Edmonton-based spokesman for Greenpeace Canada, made headlines last year when he and other activists entered the Syncrude tailings pond where the ducks had died and erected a banner over a tailings pipe that bore the image of a skull and the slogan, “World’s Dirtiest Oil: Stop the Tar Sands.”

As much as activists like Hudema would like to see the oil sands shut down entirely, with billions of dollars worth of oil yet to be extracted that is unlikely to happen. The oil sands wealth that underlies some 150,000 square kilometres of Alberta’s boreal forests — an area roughly the size of the state of Florida — is estimated to contain up to 1.7 trillion barrels of synthetic crude. Even if only a fraction of that can be recovered, say 10 percent, that still makes it the second largest oil reserve in the world, after Saudi Arabia. With the complicated geopolitical situations affecting the world’s other oil exporting countries, big consumers of oil, like the U.S., will likely import more of northern Alberta’s oil in the future, not less. At present, Canada is already the United States’ number one source of imported oil and supplies it with more oil than all the Persian Gulf nations combined.

Still, no matter how you look at it, with today’s methods for producing unconventional oil, more land gets disturbed, more water polluted, and more energy consumed than with conventional oil production. Currently, oil sands mining operations are licensed to divert up to 445 million cubic metres of fresh water from the Athabasca River each year, or enough to meet the annual water needs for a city of three million people. Similarly, it is estimated that by 2012, oil sands operations will consume two million cubic feet of natural gas every day, enough to heat every home in Canada. And whatever number you put on the industry’s controversial CO2 emissions, it is still the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases emissions in Canada and one of the reasons the country abandoned its 2020 Kyoto Protocol goals.

Despite a brief slowdown corresponding with the recent dip in oil prices and the recession, all signs now point to a huge upswing in production in the years to come. Several oil companies are opening new mines: in February, the oil company CNRL went on-line with its new Horizon mine, which produces 100,000 bbl/d; and in May, Imperial Oil announced plans to go ahead with its proposed Kearl mine, which will begin producing another 100,000 bbl/d by 2010. And almost every other company with projects in northern Alberta has projected increases in production.

So as oil sands extraction ramps up, the question is not if the environment will be harmed but by how much. Researchers at the U of A are working hard to find ways to lessen the environmental impact, with projects that look at everything from radically shrinking the industry’s water needs to projects that attempt to reclaim the tailings ponds — which critics argue are threatening the health not only of migratory ducks but of the humans who live downstream. What follows are profiles of a few — and only a few — of these academics and the groundbreaking research they are doing at the U of A. It may be comforting to know that although Albertans helped create the problems that resulted from oil sands extraction, the solutions may come from Albertans as well.

Selma Guigard, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering

As Selma Guigard sees it, the answer to many of the Alberta oil sands’ environmental problems lies at the bottom of a cup of Tim Horton’s coffee. Her solution, “supercritical fluid extraction,” may sound like just a $10 buzzword, but it is the same technology coffee companies have used for decades to decaffeinate a cup of joe. And, if the associate professor of environmental engineering is right, her application of this waterless technology to the oil sands’ water-intensive bitumen extraction process might just be the billion-dollar idea that makes the industry’s lamentable water use — and its toxic tailings ponds — a thing of the past.

Here’s the problem: in order to extract a single barrel of bitumen from the murky goop that is the Alberta oil sands, oil companies need 12 barrels of water, of which two to four barrels must be fresh water drawn from the Athabasca River. When you scale that up, taking into account that conservative estimates put oil sands production at one million barrels per day, then you are looking at draining as much as 445 million cubic metres of freshwater from the river’s tap every year.

In addition, after the bitumen is extracted, the companies are left with enormous tailings ponds — a toxic mixture of water, sand, clay and residual amounts of bitumen — which now cover 130 square kilometres of north­ern Alberta that were once boreal forests. By 2040, they are projected to grow to over 310 square kilometres, an area three times the size of Vancouver.

Guigard thinks she’s hit upon the solution. Instead of using water to extract the bitumen, she uses a carbon-dioxide-based “waterless” solvent that has been heated up and pressurized to the supercritical level. If you remember those phase diagrams from your school days, you’ll recall that substances come in three different forms: liquid, solid and gas. The state of the substance changes depending on the pressure and temperature it’s subjected to. However, there’s actually a fourth phase, where a substance is neither a liquid nor a gas but something in-between — a supercritical fluid. For carbon dioxide, that phase occurs when it’s heated to 31°C and subjected to about 73 times atmospheric (or ambient) pressure. At this phase, carbon dioxide is fluid like water, but behaves like a gas. “When carbon dioxide is at the supercritical stage, it can penetrate into solid matrices — it can really get into the nooks and crannies,” explains Guigard. “So if you have a chunk of sand, and the sand particles are packed quite closely, then the supercritical fluid can move through that quite easily.”

As the supercritical CO2 moves through the oil sand ore, it separates the bitumen from the sand and dissolves the bitumen. After the clean sand is carted away, the pressure and temperature are brought down to normal, and the supercritical carbon dioxide returns to its gaseous form and is siphoned off, leaving pure bitumen — the stuff later upgraded into gasoline. Except for trace amounts of CO2 that are lost in the process, this is a “closed loop” process, meaning the solvent is available to be used again and again.

“It’s the same way Maxwell House decaffeinates its coffee,” explains Guigard in layman’s terms. “You have these big reactors that are several storeys high, and they put the coffee beans in there, and they ramp up the pressure and temperature, and they flow carbon dioxide through and the caffeine moves out of the coffee bean and into the supercritical carbon dioxide. Then they take that supercritical carbon dioxide out of the reactor and lower the pressure and temperature until the caffeine can no longer dissolve in the fluid, so they get pure caffeine and decaffeinated coffee beans. It’s a similar process with oil sands ore.”

So far, she’s been using carbon dioxide as the solvent, “but it might not even be the best one,” she chimes in. “It is just probably the cheapest, and we know it works.”

Although Guigard’s research applies only to surface mining, which makes up about 20 percent of all oil sands production, because of the scale of the operations, the benefits of this waterless process — both environmentally and economically — are still potentially huge. Surface mining operations would no longer need to tap into the limited resources of the Athabasca River. Nor would they create the toxic tailings ponds that critics argue are leaking 11-million litres of toxic water into the surrounding environment every day.

In addition, this process could make use of more of the 30-year legacy of tailings ponds as a delivery mechanism for the mined oil sands. At present, the oil sands ore is delivered from the mine to the reactors for extraction on enormous man-made rivers of recycled water. However, for the current hot-water extraction process to work, the water needs to be of pretty high quality, and, increasingly, industry is faced with the not-so-happy choice between improving that water quality by diluting it with freshwater from the Athabasca or expensively treating it. With Guigard’s process that delivery water can be of a much lower quality — it could even come straight from the tailings ponds. “The quality of the water they use right now is crucial for extraction,” she explains. “They need pretty decent quality water. We anticipate that for our process it doesn’t matter what the quality of water is — we could potentially use tailings water.”

Similarly, some of Guigard’s preliminary modelling has shown that her process could require less energy consumption. “Less energy means less of a carbon footprint and less greenhouse gas emissions,” she says. That’s a benefit not only to society but to industry as well. “That’s one of the reasons I’m working so hard — I just see this as a win-win situation.” And if that doesn’t give a jolt to your system, then perhaps someone replaced your regular coffee with Folger’s Decaffeinated Crystals.

In fact, looking at Guigard across her crowded desk makes you wonder if perhaps someone did switch her regular coffee with decaf. The youthful academic looks as if she’s a bit tired of having to make her case again and again. Just this past spring, she’s appeared on the Business News Network and in special features in The Globe and Mail and the Edmonton Journal making the argument for funding for supercritical fluid extraction — specifically for the $1 million in funds she needs to take her research to the next level. So far, she has tested her theories at the bench — or lab — scale, and the results are impressive. Experimenting with contaminated sands, her process yielded extraction efficiencies just under the 90 percent that is the industry standard right now, and she’s working on the recipe for a CO2-based solvent that will match or beat that. But she needs funding to create reactors large enough to test the process on a larger scale before the research can be applied in the field, and she needs it before other researchers working on waterless extraction technologies beat her to the punch. And so far, no one’s throwing change in her coffee cup.

“We’ve tried to get funding from the federal government,” she says. “But they say this is ‘an industrial problem of commercial value,’ and industry should fund it. And then industry says, ‘Oh, it’s still basic research, and so government or somebody else should fund it.’ So we’re in between a rock and a hard place.”

Industry funding for research effectively dried up last year when oil prices took a nosedive to just $33 (USD) per barrel. “With the price of oil as low as it was, companies couldn’t even think about new technologies,” says Guigard. “There was no money for investment and research. When the price is too high, there’s no time for investment and research. You just put your head down and go, go, go. So you’ve got maybe a day or two when the price is just right, and that has been a challenge. But one thing about low oil prices is that it slowed things down enough for people to start thinking about the future. I think right now, where we are at around $70 per barrel is not a bad place to be.”

Now that industry is again open to listening, they might be surprised by what Guigard has to say. Preliminary modelling conducted by her collaborator Warren Stiver at the University of Guelph has shown that her process costs about $20 a barrel for mining and extraction, which puts it on par with the cost of the current hot-water extraction technology. “When we’re talking to industrial partners, they said, if we’re on the order of $20 per barrel, we’re doing well and they would consider it.”

Of course, that figure doesn’t take into account the cost of completely revamping the infrastructure the industry has been investing in for the past 30 years, and no matter what the price of a barrel of oil, they are unlikely to be excited about that. “That’s a big challenge,” admits Guigard, “but what I’m trying to convince them of is that it’s not necessarily something that would have to occur overnight. With any new technology you can’t bring it on that quickly, it has to be able to fit in with the existing infrastructure. And with the current mining process and the hydro-transportation, we could fit nicely into that. It wouldn’t change that substantially. We have to bring new technology on slowly so that they can adapt.”

And how long would it take before we might see wholesale change in the Alberta oil sands? For the oil and gas industry, explains Guigard, 10 to 15 years is the shortest time scale for introducing new technologies — especially in the oil sands because of their enormous scale — and that’s what she’s shooting for at the moment. Right now, she’s in talks with interested partners for a three- to five-year pilot project that could be conducted at the University. If all goes well, the results from that “micro” pilot would enable them to begin a “macro” pilot, lasting another three to five years, in Fort McMurray. “And then, hopefully, if all goes well, we could try it out with someone with a substantial lease and could do a demonstration pilot.”

“If we stay with the status quo,” says Guigard, “the extraction technology and the methods they’re using now, we know what’s going to happen, the tailings ponds are going to grow. They’re going to use more water, and we won’t be able to stop it. So do we stay with the status quo or do we change things? There is room for change. We need to change. And it can be a win-win situation for everybody.”

Whether or not oil companies want to start thinking about change, change is on the horizon. “It’s coming,” says Guigard, her enthusiasm rising. “There’s more and more pressure. People are just seeing these tailing ponds grow and grow, and the reality is, the oil sands operations are expanding, and there’s going to be less and less water available to them, so they have to figure out a way to use less water.”
 

Julia Foght, Professor of Biological Sciences

While Selma Guigard is looking at how to prevent the creation of future tailings ponds, her collaborator in the Department of Biological Sciences, Julia Foght, ’76 BSc, ’85 PhD, is looking at what to do about the 30-year legacy of tailings ponds we already have on our hands. Foght’s research focuses on the solid tailings — the particles of sand, silt, clay and hydrocarbon floating around in the tailings water after it’s been run through the bitumen extraction process — and how to make them settle faster. The faster they settle, the more water is available to skim off the top for recycling back into the extraction process and, thus, the less fresh water is needed from the Athabasca River to keep up with production demands. The hope is that by speeding up this process, the existing ponds — so big that they can be seen from space on Google Earth — need not double in size again, as they have done in the past four years.

Ironically, the key to this massive settling process are bacteria so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye. In fact, for years no one knew that these naturally occurring microbes were already present in the tailings ponds — and hard at work.

Foght was first tipped off to their presence in 1985, when the oil sands company Syncrude asked for a microbial survey of the tailings ponds. Although the Syncrude tailings ponds had been around for almost a decade, no one really knew what was growing in them. At first, she was skeptical, “I thought there wouldn’t be much there, because what kind of microbes could possibly live in that gunk? There’s no oxygen and the bitumen is extremely hard to degrade.” But, sure enough, the ponds were chock full of microbes — billions per litre — though at the time no one knew what, if anything, they did.

Then, in the mid-90s, bubbles started erupting on the surface of Syncrude’s largest tailings pond, and these bubbles were full of methane. “The only reasonable way to explain it was that there were bacteria out there producing methane, just like they do at the sewage treatment plant or at a landfill, or when you have bubbles coming out of the gooey bottom of a prairie pond,” she recalls.

This piqued Foght’s interest, and, along with a number of her U of A colleagues, she began investigating the process at work. What they found was that at a certain stage in the life of a tailings pond, hydrocarbons left over from the bitumen extraction process were stimulating a family of microbes called methanogens to produce the gas bubbles. And based on Syncrude’s own internal monitoring, one remarkable side effect was that the tailings in the methane-producing ponds were beginning to settle much more quickly than before. Foght has termed this process “biodensification” and has made understanding the science behind it the focus of her current research.

To grasp the significance of Foght’s research, one must first understand the scale of these ponds and how they work. After the bitumen is extracted from the oil sand, what’s left is something called “tailings slurry,” a murky, grey mixture of water, sand, clay, hydrocarbons and trace amounts of bitumen. Foght, holding up a small bottle of the slurry, likens its consistency to “runny toothpaste,” and it looks a lot like the water in an actual pond after you’ve stirred up the sediment. The water portion of the slurry can eventually be recycled back into the extraction process. (About 85 percent of the water used in the extraction process is recycled tailings water.) But the trick is separating it from the solid tailings — the sand and clay.

At present, the only tool the oil companies have is time. They pump the slurry into 35-metre-deep tailings ponds and wait for the solids to settle to the bottom. And they wait and wait and wait. This can take years — even decades — and while they wait, these tailings ponds grow and grow and grow. In fact, “pond” is really a misnomer. The Mildred Lake Settling Basin, begun by Syncrude in 1978, is now among the largest man-made structures on Earth. Its retaining walls, which are 21 kilometres in circumference and hold 220-million cubic metres of tailings, are bigger than the Hoover Dam, bigger even than the Great Wall of China.

If Foght and her team can figure out how to get those tailings to settle faster, then more water is available to quickly recycle back into the extraction process and less fresh water needs to be drawn from the Athabasca. If you can cut down water demand by even a few percent, you can save millions of litres of fresh water per year. The savings — to the Athabasca, to the lands that it feeds, even to the oil companies — could be huge.

In her labs on the U of A campus and at the University-owned Oils Sands Tailings Research Facility in Devon, Alberta, Foght and her students and colleagues are not just studying the basic science of biodensification, about which little is known, but they are also feeling about for ways to speed it up. What’s amazing about biodensification is it’s still such a mystery. “Here we are 10 years after we first saw the methane bubbles, and we still don’t know what’s happening,” she laments. “But we do know there’s a correlation between the methane production of these microbes and the settling out of the water and the more compacted solids.”

What Foght thinks is happening is that hydrocarbons present in the tailings slurry — the trace amounts of solvent that escape recovery after the extraction process — trigger the methanogens to produce the methane, and that, in turn, causes the solids to settle. To identify the mechanism at work, Foght and her colleagues are using DNA-sequencing to find out which of the 100 species of methanogens present in the murky goop are key to the activity. It’s a tedious process, much like what you see in an episode of CSI; however, it takes a lot longer than the 44 minutes of the television show.

Meanwhile, the U of A researchers are looking for ways to manipulate these microbes that will cause them to work even faster. So far, in controlled lab experiments, they have found organic carbon amendments that stimulate the methanogens and increase the settling-out by as much as 10 times the normal rate.

In her campus lab, Foght points out a pair of two-litre glass cylinders that illustrate her findings. Both contain the mature fine tailings found in the tailings ponds, and in both you can see the methane bubbles working their way up the runny, toothpaste-like goop. In the control cylinder, a 10 ml sliver of water, no bigger than your thumbnail, has separated out on top. In the other, where she has added a carbon amendment, a 100 ml pool of water — about as deep as your hand is wide — floats on top. “And this is the difference after just three to four weeks,” she says, obviously proud. “And it’s not just the volume of water, it’s the speed at which it happens. The unamended tailings will eventually give you this 100 ml of water, but it’s going to take months, years, who knows how long, whereas this one gives you water that’s available to reuse right away.”

Applying this discovery in the field is still a long way off. Right now, Foght and her colleagues have their sights on a pilot program three years down the road, and they want to be sure of the basic science at work before attempting to reproduce the experiments in the field. From there, applying Foght’s work to the massive scale of the tailings ponds is a challenge she’ll gladly leave to the engineers. But she can already imagine how it might work: a flow-through system, much like at a sewage treatment plant, where the existing tailings are pumped out of the ponds, given carbon amendments to stimulate the methanogens, resulting in water that is recycled back into the extraction process and a thicker tailings slurry that is deposited into a final reservoir for eventual reclamation. The whole process might take weeks or months, instead of years or decades.

One key intermediate step to this process will have to be trapping the methane produced by the biodensification. After all, methane is a greenhouse gas — and a highly explosive one at that. But it’s also one of the cleanest-burning fuels we have. “So is there some way we can encourage the methane to be produced, but we trap it and use it on site as a clean burning fuel?,” she asks. That’s another question she’ll leave to the engineers. Still, it’s hard not to get excited about research that not only addresses the oil sands’ problems of water-use and the legacy of tailings ponds, but may even replace some of the carbon-intensive extraction methods with a cleaner-burning fuel.

“To be clear,” warns Foght, lest we don our rose-coloured glasses, “what we’re doing is only a stop-gap measure. We’re not going to make the tailings ponds disappear overnight. It’s just a way, in the interim, of reducing the impact until something better can be found.”

But even that may be cause for cheer to a public increasingly troubled by the bad news being reported from northern Alberta. “People are out there wringing their hands about the tailings ponds, not sure what to do other than say ‘shut them down.’ But we are applying sound science to a really big problem, and there actually is the potential to do something about it in the short term.”

Anne Naeth, Professor of Ecology and Land Reclamation

Looking at a photo of an open pit mine in the Alberta oil sands, you’d be forgiven if you just threw up your hands at the possibility of ever returning the land to something approaching its original state. Everything that once lived or grew there has been stripped away to a depth of up to 50 metres and carted off in trucks almost four storeys high. What remains is a barren wasteland of sand and stone that looks more like the fictional shadowland of Mordor, from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, than anything you might encounter in the real world. But Anne Naeth, ’76 BSc, ’85 MSc, ’88 PhD, a professor in the Department of Renewable Resources, insists that such a landscape can be as green and teeming with life as the Edmonton River Valley, which can be seen from the window of her 8th-floor office, stretching out for miles beneath a sunny Alberta sky.

What manner of pixie dust would you need to pull that off, you might wonder?

In fact, the key to restoring more than 47,000 hectares of land — mostly boreal forest — affected by oil sands mining lies in some very real dust that Naeth and her graduate student, Dean Mackenzie, ’03 BSc, ’06 MSc, have been studying for the past six years. LFH materials, as these earthy particles are known, are a combination of plant propagules — the seeds, roots, tubers and clippings from which new plans grow — and a hefty dose of nutrient-rich compost. They are literally the “litter” of the forest, and the underlying layers of partially and well-decomposed organic matter (the “fibric” and “humic” layers).

Although it was long known that these LFH materials were useful for improving soil quality in land that had been strip-mined or contaminated, Naeth’s big idea was that applying the right recipe of LFH materials could regenerate the diverse plant community that was there before the land was disturbed. “And it just worked beautifully,” she says. “This was one of those really successful projects where it has worked even better than we thought it would, because we didn’t realize the number of plants that would grow from it.” Blueberries, raspberries, lilies and wild geraniums are just a few of the more than 100 species that grow in profusion on the test sites that Naeth and Mackenzie have planted — over 10 times as many plant species as grow on sites reclaimed with traditional practices.

One of the biggest problems in reclaiming land affected by oil sands extraction is the near-impossibility of acquiring seed for many of the species native to the boreal forests. Only about five percent are available commercially, and the rest are either expensive or only available in small amounts. However, by using LFH materials, oil sands companies stand to save a bundle — and the environment will reap the rewards. According to Naeth and Mackenzie’s modelling, it would cost between $150,000 and $250,00 per hectare to achieve the same plant densities using traditional out-planting methods that they can achieve using only the wealth that was lying on the forest floor.

Even with the aid of LFH materials, you might think it would take a long time to regenerate a forest from land that has been stripped bare, but in fact, says Naeth, the change is relatively rapid. Apply a little LFH on the top of a bed of new soil, and in two to three years you will have an early successional community — a dense covering of one-metre plants such as marsh reed grass, June grass, strawberries and asters. In five to six years, you’ll have a two- to three-metre understory, with a lot of trembling aspen and jackpine peaking out from beneath the undergrowth. Naeth hasn’t been working with LFH materials long enough to know what type of mature forests it might produce, “but the plants that I’m working with — the grasses, the forbs, the flowers, the mosses — those plants grow very quickly, and so you get a community that grows very quickly.” (Incidentally, Naeth’s colleague in the Department of Renewable Resources, Simon Landhäusser, has just received a prestigious NSERC Chair to research ways to restore native trees — and merchantable timber — to reclaimed oil sands sites.)

What’s surprising in talking with Naeth, a gregarious and voluble woman with a dark pixie cut and an impish grin, is that for years the precious LFH materials were just swept up and thrown in the rubbish bin with the rest of the overburden. “Prior to our research, companies could do what they wanted with LFH,” she says. “They could put it back in the pit, they could dump it elsewhere. It wasn’t viewed as being a valuable material. We have shown that it is valuable, and now the government has said that they can’t just throw this stuff away any more, they have to use it.” Here, she’s referring to a 2007 Alberta law — enacted in response to her and Mackenzie’s research recommendations — that requires oil sands companies to use the LFH materials they remove from new mining sites.

How best to use this valuable and limited resource is a question that has kept Naeth busy ever since. Generally, LFH is found only in the top 10-15 cm of soil. Dig much deeper, she learned, and it becomes diluted with too much soil. Skim off the top, and you aren’t left with much to work with, “Basically, there’s not a lot of it, and we could use a lot more than what’s there.” She has a number of current research projects looking at how to get the biggest bang for your LFH buck. Will just a dusting suffice, or do you need a smooth layer? Are you better off taking the LFH and spreading it over an entire site, or can you use little clumps of it to create micro-sites, which will then fan out to cover a larger area? And how long can you store LFH before it loses its viability?

The question of storage was of vital importance to oil sands companies. “The reality of the situation is that the oil sands companies are removing the LFH so they can mine the area, but then what do you do with it, where do you put it?,” she asks. “Ideally, you would take it to an area close by, where you could spread it around, but there may not be areas that are ready to be reclaimed. In fact, maybe it’s going to be three or four years before there’s land that’s ready to be reclaimed. So can the companies stockpile this material and then reuse it when they have a site that’s ready? We found out that you can’t.”

According to Naeth’s and Mackenzie’s research, stockpiles of LFH materials lose much of their viability after only three to six months. “It’s still good as an organic soil amendment, but it doesn’t have the ability to generate a plant community,” she says. “Only the odd plant, like a wild geranium, will survive because you’ve created very inhospitable conditions for the seed, where the gases build up and there’s no air, so the seed just dies.”

So what do you do with this earthen gold if you have nowhere to put it and you can’t stockpile it for later use? One of the ideas put forward is a sort of LFH-trading scheme, where if Company A has LFH materials and no place to seed it, and Company B has land ready to be reclaimed but no LFH materials, then Company B should be allowed to use Company A’s LFH. “What hasn’t been figured out yet, from a legal or regulatory perspective, is would it be appropriate for Alberta Environment to say they have to share?,” says Naeth. “But what we do know is that you can’t not use this material, and you can’t stockpile it because it will lose its seed viability.”

The final results to these and many of Naeth and Mackenzie’s studies of LFH materials will be ready in a year or two, and Alberta Environment has already stated that industry must follow their recommendations when clearing new sites and reclaiming old ones. “All of the research that we’ve been doing shows this works, and it’s time for the oil sands companies to take this research and apply it because we know it works,” says Naeth. “I know it may sound too easy, like I’ve neglected to talk about the difficulties, but the biggest obstacle is money, really, and the will and the commitment of companies to say they will implement what the research has shown they can do.”

But, in many cases, it’s the oil companies that are knocking on her door. “The industrial support is very strong. When I was first starting out, I would apply to companies for funding, but I haven’t been doing that for many, many years. Now they come to me. They say, ‘We’ve got this problem, can you set up a research project to solve it?’” Almost every oil company operating in northern Alberta contributed funding for her LFH projects: Syncrude, Suncor, Total, CNRL, Petro Canada, Albian Sands, Imperial Oil. At present, she has industry-sponsored LFH field projects operating on the site of an abandoned coal mine in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia; on a limestone quarry outside of Eckshaw, Alberta; and in the Jasper, Waterton Lakes and Elk Island parks, where tourist overuse, historical contamination and industrial over- development have severely degraded the landscape.

In addition to her LFH research, Naeth has been studying how to reclaim tailings ponds and the dykes that surround them. To date, no one has been able to reclaim any of the tailings ponds in northern Alberta, but Naeth and her colleagues at the University of Alberta have found several native plant species that will not only survive but will thrive on top of the tailings slurry. She also hopes to develop a planting method that, in cooperation with other engineering applications, will go some way toward shrinking the monumental amount of water currently stored in the ponds, “We’re looking at plants that use a lot of water. So if we grow them in the tailings, might they actually help with the dewatering process?” In greenhouse experiments, plants such as sunflowers, mustards and raspberries have been shown to form micro-sites, dry little islands of vegetation, on top of tailings-like water. She is just now beginning a field project with Suncor and hopes to see results in three to four years.

In the meantime, the mere fact that areas stripped by mining and flooded with toxic tailings can be reclaimed should give us all cause for hope, although it flies in the face of public perception of the oil sands. “A lot of people think you cannot get plants to grow in the material that’s left after oil sands mining takes place,” says Naeth, “but plants do grow there. Reclamation is achievable, and it doesn’t have to take 50 years to do it.” To prove this, Naeth pulls out a picture. It was taken by Mackenzie at the site of a former Syncrude mine, about 61 kilometres north of Fort McMurry, just three years after they planted it with LFH materials. “Somebody can go and walk their dog out there and not know they’re on a reclaimed area,” she says. “They’ll find blueberries and rose bushes, grasses and trees. And a nutrient analysis of those blueberries would show them to be better than what you could find in a grocery store. The public should take some comfort knowing that pretty soon we will start seeing areas that have been reclaimed — and reclaimed well.”