How tar sands companies could turn a new leaf
The tar sands continue to (deservedly) attract condemnation.
Since I wrote earlier about Nippon Oil’s transformative plans to add major solar and fuel cells businesses to its petroleum core, I got to wondering what similar transformations tar sands miners could undertake.
The miners are under pressure from the Alberta government to reduce freshwater use. What this effectively means is that instead of using fresh water from the Athabasca River for their chemical processing, the miners have to use the water from their tailings ponds. In order to do that, they have to clean it, separating out the finely-dispersed oily residues. Doing so is difficult, and is thus expensive.
But if the miners did develop a way to separate the water from the residues… perhaps they could get into the business of water purification. Demand for oil may decrease as new technologies evolve, but demand for clean water should remain strong for, well, forever.
It would be nice to reassert Canadian primacy in the water-filtration field — just a few years ago, Ontario-based water-filtration company Zenon Environmental got assimilated into the Borg known as General Electric. It was a terrible pity, considering that Zenon appeared to be first among peers in its field, the ‘RIM’ of its industry.