Cleaning Canadian Tar Sand Water

(Editor's note: What a busy week! There's hardly been time to post anything, much-the-less studying up on energy.)

Canadian tar sand production is a dirty, nasty business. It's relatively common knowledge that Canadian tar sands must be mined; vast amounts of water, super-heated by nat. gas, is necessary to separate the bitumen from the sand. This in effect leaves behind highly polluted, toxic man-made lakes where the polluted water is stored.

CNFO offers a solution to this. It's press release states: "it has been engaged by Premere Resources Corporation to develop a new application of its desalination technology to clean waste water from heavy oil and tar sands processing."

More from the press release states:

Large amounts of brine water are created in the processing of heavy oil. CNFO will adapt its desalination process to clean this waste water so that it may be reused instead of discarded as an environmental waste product.

Forty percent of Canada's oil production is from tar sands. The large amount of salt water produced in this process has become an increasing threat to the environment. CNFO's technology will address this threat by separating the clean water from the pollutants so that the fresh water can be reused. This will reduce the amount of water consumed in production and the amount of environmental waste produced by the process. There is more oil stored in tar sands than in all conventional reserves combined. Production of oil from tar sands is expected to increase significantly in the next several years.

This still doesn't dilute the fact that, because of the vast mining operation, the land suffers terrible scars as a result. One can even see the mining's effect from lower orbit in space. However, we are forced to rely on hydrocarbons for the moment to power our lifestyle - nobody, save for boondoggled hermits, wishes to embrace a 19nth century or Mad Max lifestyle. The unpardonable environmental sins, though, should give us extra incentive to move onto the sustainable 21st century lifestyle, and make hydrocarbons obsolete.

Let's move; chop-chop!

- Brewskie

- Brewskie