Oil Sands Process Water
Fifteen years of work on the hardest water in Canada — from a University of Alberta research chair to commercial trials in the Athabasca region.
The Problem
Alberta's Oil Sands Mine Water Steering Committee reports that the province's tailings ponds hold more than 1.4 billion cubic metres of fluid tailings. The water in them is not simply dirty. It carries naphthenic acids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, BTEX compounds, dissolved metals and other persistent organic contaminants — precisely the fraction that conventional treatment handles poorly.
For most of the last two decades this was a research question. It is now an implementation question. The Government of Alberta has accepted the Steering Committee's recommendations to develop and pilot treatment technologies and to establish science-based standards for treated water. Technologies that work at scale, in cold weather, at defensible cost, are what the province is now asking for.
Where Our Work Began
In 2011 BioLargo became a founding industrial partner in the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Oil Sands Tailings Water Treatment at the University of Alberta, alongside major oil sands producers, EPCOR, COSIA, Alberta Innovates and Alberta Environment. That program assessed a broad range of treatment approaches for persistent organics in process-affected water, and it is where our understanding of this water was formed.
BioLargo Canada has operated from the University of Alberta in Edmonton ever since, supported by NRC-IRAP, NSERC and more than seventy grants for the development and commercialization of water treatment technology.
What We Built
The Advanced Oxidation System (AOS) is an electrochemical advanced oxidation reactor. It generates powerful oxidants in place, from a low dose of iodide and a small amount of electricity, and breaks organic contaminants apart rather than moving them somewhere else. The main features:
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Low energy. Reactors operate in the range of 3 to 18 watts.
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No chemical dosing. No coagulants, no ozone generation, no hydrogen peroxide delivery and storage.
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Small footprint, modular. Reactors run in parallel or series, so capacity is added by adding units — well suited to remote and cold-weather sites.
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Built for a treatment train. Pretreatment removes solids; the AOS destroys organics; reverse osmosis polishing can follow where salinity has to come out.
What It Does to Oil Sands Process Water
Testing to date has been at bench scale, on specific waters under specific conditions. The results below are what has been measured, not a performance guarantee.
Three Distinct Results:
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Synthetic naphthenic acids: 65–90% removal in a single pass, rising to 90–99% after approximately one hour of recirculation.
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Real oil sands process water: 90% reduction in fluorescent organics at 4.2 W, and LC-QTOF analysis showing a 64% reduction in total naphthenic acids over six hours.
Municipal Wastewater
Municipal wastewater (independent reference): At the Vaudreuil-Dorion wastewater treatment facility in Quebec, a continuous-flow AOS pilot removed 79–98% of nine prevalent pharmaceutical compounds at an estimated operating cost of roughly $0.21 per cubic metre.
The Published Record
The AOS is not an unexamined claim. Its mechanism, by-products, safety and performance have been through peer review:
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Daghrir et al. (2023). Assessment of an electrochemical advanced oxidation system for removal of pharmaceutical compounds at the Vaudreuil-Dorion municipal wastewater treatment facility. Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology. doi:10.1039/d3ew00432e
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Bettman et al. (2022). Optimization and assessment of an electrochemical advanced oxidation system for synthetic stormwater treatment. Environmental Science and Pollution Research. doi:10.1007/s11356-022-21390-9
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Moustafa et al. (2021). Operando studies of iodine species in an advanced oxidative water treatment reactor. ACS ES&T Water. doi:10.1021/acsestwater.1c00149
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Verwold et al. (2021). New iodine-based electrochemical advanced oxidation system for water disinfection: are disinfection by-products a concern? Water Research, 201, 117340. doi:10.1016/j.watres.2021.117340
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He et al. (2021). Removal of biological effects of organic pollutants in municipal wastewater by a novel advanced oxidation system. Journal of Environmental Management, 280, 111855. doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.111855
From Bench to Field
The scale-up path runs from 6-inch and 12-inch reactors through a 100 L/min pilot to containerized commercial units operating in parallel. That work is now being carried out through Tu Nipi Water Solutions, an Indigenous-led venture in the Athabasca region.
