Fundamental aspects of sustainable energy and metal productions

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Canada has the world's greatest repository of hydrocarbon resources, a large portion of them are bitumen in oil-sand. Upgrading bitumen to crude oil produces waste such as fluid coke. In Alberta alone the production of oil-sand fluid coke exceeds 10000 tonnes per day. Due to its high sulphur content, all fluid coke produced is being added to the existing stockpiles (over 50 million tonnes). Given the increasing importance of oil sand in Canada's energy portfolio, the production of petroleum coke will increase. As more sulphur is being rejected to meet the increasingly stringent environmental regulations for low-sulphur transportation fuel, an increase in the coke sulphur content is also anticipated. The high sulphur content of oil sand petroleum coke limits its use as a fuel due to the need to provide expensive flue gas cleanup. Canada is also a major producer of a range of non-ferrous metals such as Cu and Ni. Metallurgical processes often produce flue gases containing sulphur dioxide - a precursor of acid rain. With the support from NSERC, we developed a new technology - SOactive process which captures sulphur dioxide in a salable form and, at the same time converts the waste coke to a novel active carbon (ECOcarbon) - a highly valuable material that has a range of environmental and industrial applications. This proposed research is to optimize the structure and chemistry of ECOcarbon for it best performance in several areas: as a sorbent material for controlling mercury emission from coal-fired power plants and metal smelters and for air and water purification; as an electric energy storage material for increased energy efficiency and for reduced the green house gas emissions. Another line of research is environmental applications of ionic liquids - a new class of materials that are considered to be "green" for their extremely low volatility. Our long term goal is to develop novel ionic liquid-based technologies for capturing green house gas and acid gas in a much more energy efficient way. We believe the anticipated advance in our research will help this country become a world leader in sustainable energy and metal production, create high-pay jobs, and improve the quality of life of all Canadian.