Long term dewatering of amended oil sands tailings

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Management of tailings in the oil sands industry contintues to be a challenege both economically and from an environmental perspective. Many developing technologies appear to be promsing to reduce environmental impacts and to facilitate recalamation of tailings sites and ecological respotration, but substantial room for increasing technical performance and finding cost efficiencies remains. Recent regulatory changes and industry outlook have re-directed priorities towards longer term low cost solutions to dewatering fines grained tailings and facilitiate closure and ecological restoration of tailings ponds over the mine lifetime (20 to 30 year outlook), rather than high cost solutions that target short-term goals. Technically, this leads to a need to better understand the natural long term (months to years) dewatering behaviour of new tailings technologies, which is the scientific focus of the proposed project. The project will develops new measurement devices and techniques for evaluating the long-term dewatering behaviour of oil sands fine tailings.******