Understanding and Developing New Methods for Treating Oil Sands Tailings

Abstract

Management of oil sands tailings from bitumen extraction operations remains a challenge for mineable oil sands producers. Promoting fine solids settling in tailings ponds is key to treating oil sands tailings. Present study explores two methods of tailings treatment – ATA process and polymer assisted CT process. ATA (Anchor-Tether-Activator) process involves anchor of particles usually coarse solids with tethering polymer and adding an activator polymer to tailings slurry. MF1011 was used as activator polymer, while in-house synthesized Al-PAM and commercially available pDADMAC were used as tethering polymers. Both Al-PAM and pDADMAC were able to produce non-segregated tailings, but the initial settling rate was higher with the use of Al-PAM while the turbidity of supernatant was lowest with the use of pDADMAC. A novel method for treating oil sands tailings using only coarse sand and tethered polymer pDADMAC was developed. This new process is capable of producing clear water for extraction and sediment bed of high yield stresses at significantly reduced consumption of polymers.