Grant: Alliance Grants

The oil sands provide over 200,000 Canadians with employment and represent over $243 billion in capital expenditures to date; however, mining and refining operations are heavily criticized for their environmental impacts. The image of tailings ponds evoke especially negative sentiments that preclude informed understanding, preventing a balanced value assessment both within Canada and abroad. In fact, companies are required to return 100% of the land to a self-sustaining ecosystem with local vegetation and wildlife. Hence, developing effective remediation technologies for mines and tailings ponds is critical for both reclamation and social licensing. Assessing the effectiveness of reclamation requires complete knowledge about potential impacts developed through comprehensive testing and reliable data. This information is also needed to ensure that reclamation will produce landscapes that are safe and suitable for end users, including Indigenous communities and wildlife. This partnership will generate new knowledge about environmental processes in a scaled-down treatment landscape designed to demonstrate and troubleshoot a new oil sands tailings treatment process, to support the assessment of ecological impacts and the associated reclamation and closure of oil sands pit lakes. The SWAMP lab will focus on the inputs, transformations and outputs of trace elements (TEs) through the landscape to ensure that they are in forms and concentrations that are safe. This will include developing new technologies for environmental monitoring, environmental toxicology, and agricultural practices. Activities will include: 1) Quantify the impact of precipitation chemistry, water residence time, and freeze-thaw processes on TE distributions and mobility in soil solutions; 2) Quantify relationships between soil properties and the uptake of TEs by plants; 3) Quantify relationships between lake water and sediment properties vs. uptake of TEs by aquatic organisms.