Alberta to invest $50-million to help develop oil sands water, tailings technologies

Globe and Mail

17-06-2025

Alberta has earmarked $50-million to boost technologies that can help reduce and manage the massive oil sands tailings ponds in the province's north.
The cash for the new program, announced Tuesday, will come from the province's carbon price on large emitters. The program will be managed by Emissions Reduction Alberta through a competition for private companies to develop new and existing technologies that make tailings and water treatment cheaper and more effective.
Successful applicants can receive up to $15-million per project, with a minimum funding request of $1-million. Emissions Reduction Alberta, which distributes government funds to help innovators develop and demonstrate Alberta-based technologies that lower emissions and costs for industries, will contribute no more than half to any single project.
Tailings are a by-product of the process used to extract bitumen from mined oil sands, and are a mixture of sand, clay, water, silt, residual bitumen and other hydrocarbons, salts and trace metals.
The issue of how to deal with them has bedevilled Alberta for years. There are roughly 1.4 million cubic metres of fluid tailings and more than 390 million cubic metres of water in ponds in the oil sands region.
Although some ponds have been reclaimed, the volume of tailings continues to grow, in part because any water captured on a site must be kept there – even if it's snow melt or rain that hasn't been used in the mining process.
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Remediating oil sands mines could cost $130-billion, according to a 2018 internal Alberta Energy Regulator memo, though in an official estimate the regulator puts the cost around $34-billion.
Managing tailings is a complex problem, Alberta Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz said at a Tuesday press conference at the University of Calgary, where she announced the $50-million program.
Not only do they create an environmental and financial liability, she said, they also take water permanently out of the system, preventing it from being used by others who need it.
Some companies use internal water recycling at their sites that surpass 90 per cent, saving millions of litres from ending up in a tailings pond. And the sector has invested billions of dollars into testing ways to adapt and develop new water treatment technologies, Ms. Schulz said.
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But that work needs to shift into overdrive: 'We need more advanced technologies to help reduce, treat and manage mine water,' she said.
Justin Riemer, chief executive of Emissions Reduction Alberta, said at the press conference that the $50-million competition is designed to hasten pilot programs and deployment of the most promising solutions. It will be focused on technologies that treat oil sands waste water, accelerate and lower the costs of land reclamation, and reduce the use of fresh water in oil sands operations.
Kendall Dilling, president of the Pathways Alliance, a group of oil sands companies that have pledged to bring production to net-zero by 2050, said at the press conference that the program will play an important role in addressing the tailings issue.
But, he added, companies will continue to use a vast array of tools to deal with tailings, including sharing water between mine sites to minimize new withdrawals from the Athabasca River.
The oil sands sector has been waiting for more than a decade for a treat-and-release regulation from the federal government, similar to policies that govern other mining industries.
Ms. Schulz said she had some productive conversations with former federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault about the tailings issue, but she has not yet spoken with his replacement, Julie Dabrusin.
Multiple cases of spills and leaks from tailings ponds have been reported by oil companies in recent years.
At Imperial Oil Ltd.'s Kearl site, a long-running leak has resulted in an unknown volume of tailings leeching into the environment. A drainage storage pond at the site also overflowed, spilling roughly 5.3 million litres of industrial waste water laced with pollutants into the environment, and another incident sent thousands of litres of water from a settling pond into the Muskeg River.
In April, 2023, almost six million litres of water with more than twice the legal limit of suspended solids was released from a pond at Suncor's Fort Hills oil sands project into the Athabasca River watershed.
A recent study by an Alberta ecologist found that the province's energy regulator lacks the data required to assess and manage the environmental impact of tailings spills, and has underestimated the number and volumes of spills in the oil sands.