- Versatile extraction process applicable to both water-wet and oil-wet sands
- Green technology will save wildlife
- Closed loop technology uses less water than traditional open loop processes
Tailings ponds, despite an innocuous name that makes them sound like an amusement park feature, are anything but amusing. They are as potentially treacherous as serpents hidden in the grass and remain so only because news reporting on their alarming threat has been scant. Containing mammoth quantities of residual toxic sludge, tailings ponds scar the landscapes already disturbed by the oil-sands industry. As if to highlight their destruction, many in Alberta, the hub of Canada’s industry, are decorated with bizarre orange anthropomorphic figures. These scarecrows are a feeble attempt to keep birds away. Many do not and perish slowly, ensnared by the paralyzing paste. Nevertheless, the peril to the environment posed by tailings ponds may soon abate. Petroteq Energy Inc. (TSX.V: PQE) (OTCQX: PQEFF) has developed a unique, environmentally-safe, continuous flow, closed loop technology – a first in North America and probably in the world – that is likely to make tailings ponds for oil sands a relic of the past.
A tailings pond is a wet storage area for the unwanted residual material or ‘tailings’ left behind after mining and extracting resources, such as bitumen from oil sands. Tailings ponds allow the tailings to be continuously submerged, although some tailings can be ‘dry covered’ under soil. They are usually engineered structures but, in some instances, natural bodies of water have been turned into such dumps, which altogether ‘now cover 176 square kilometres and hold enough liquid to fill the equivalent of 390,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools’, according to the Toronto Star (http://nnw.fm/V8a9D). CBC News has reported on a Canadian government federal study of 2014 that found ‘Alberta’s oil sands are polluting ground water and seeping into the Athabasca River’ (http://nnw.fm/T5ZAw). The extraction process developed by Petroteq could put an end to all that, since the technology is closed loop.
Petroteq Energy is focused on the development and implementation of proprietary technologies for the environmentally safe extraction of heavy oils from oil sands, oil shale deposits and shallow oil deposits, and, so, its oil-sands extraction technology does not require tailings ponds. The only elements that ever leave the closed-loop system are the extracted crude oil and the cleaned sands, which can be placed back in the earth or sold as clean sand for construction or fracking purposes.
This extraction technology is the result of almost five years of research by Petroteq’s research and engineering teams, headed up by the company’s chief technology officer, Dr. Vladimir Podlipskiy, well known for his work with benign solvents. During this time, Petroteq has gradually enhanced and improved the efficiencies of its technology at each stage of fabrication with better dryer/mixer components and a higher consistency of oil sands flow. The extraction technology is versatile; it can be effectively applied to both “water-wet” deposits, such as the oil sands in Alberta, Canada, or “oil-wet” deposits, such as the resources typically found in Utah.
It also solves the water problem. Processing oil sands requires large volumes of water, ‘about 3 barrels of fresh water to produce one barrel of oil’, according to Oil Sands Magazine (http://nnw.fm/2vYpB). This poses a particular challenge to western U.S. states like Utah, which are relatively arid. Petroteq’s extraction technology utilizes no water in the extraction process. It also produces no greenhouse gases and requires no high temperatures or pressures. In addition, the technology extracts up to 99 percent of all hydrocarbon content and recycles almost all the benign solvents. This certainly looks like technology that could protect the environment and the droves of geese, ducks, swans, and other species that cannot tell the difference between a tailings pond and a sparkling spring.
For more information, please visit www.Petroteq.energy
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