Grant: Engage Grants Program

HJC Consulting Inc.(Edmonton, AB) is developing miniaturised capillary electrophoresis (CE) analysis technology together with the Donkor research group at Thompson Rivers University (TRU; Kamloops, BC) to separate the components in water samples used for environmental, agricultural and industrial water monitoring. The technology being developed is of considerable interest to and may be acquired by 3 Canadian companies working in these sectors. One of them, Wilson Analytical Services, is developing a product enabled by the technology from the Donkor-HJC Consulting project to meet the growing demand from oil and gas operators, service companies and regulators for reliable and accurate 'point of sampling' water analysis. Oilfield water consumption is vast and, as a result, under intense public and governmental scrutiny. The ability to rapidly assess water quality in the field will allow a company in the oil and gas sector to determine whether recycling of process water is viable and/or how to treat it to make it recyclable, thereby dramatically reducing fresh water consumption. The product, manufactured in Canada, will dramatically reduce the turn-around time for an assay result from 4-7 days to about 30 minutes, affording its users considerable economic and environmental advantages in terms of reducing fresh water and process chemical consumption, and of effective wastewater treatment. Dr. Kingsley Donkor, a Professor of Chemistry at TRU, has teamed up with HJC Consulting in a project that explores the use of capillary electrophoresis (CE) to develop a comprehensive assay of the components present in oilfield water samples, many of which are also in agricultural and environmental samples. While most water analysis is performed using large instruments in a central laboratory setting, the use of CE will allow the analysis to be miniaturised into a portable, breadbox-sized instrument for use in the field.