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Calgary teen's oilsands cleanup technology sweeps Canadian and International science fairs


Scott Sutherland
Meteorologist/Science Writer

Thursday, September 18, 2014, 2:56 PM - Calgary's Hayley Todesco has already taken home the Canadian Stockholm Junior Water Prize and the Canadian Google Science Fair prize, and now her new filter technology, which promises to reduce the job of cleaning up toxic oil sand tailings ponds from centuries to decades, has netted her the international Stockholm Junior Water Prize as well.

Extracting oil sands bitumen from the ground is a messy endeavour. The bitumen in the Athabasca oil sands is close enough to the surface that it is simply dug out of the ground, loaded into the trucks and then delivered to processing plants. Hot water is added to this mixture of sand, clay, water and oil, to separate out as much of the oil as possible, and the rest - called 'tailings' - is pumped into large ponds. In these tailing ponds, the heavier stuff settles to the bottom, and the water on top is reused in the separation process, but with the residual oil in that water, these ponds represent a large reservoir of toxins that can cause damage to the environment if there's ever a leak.

And there most certainly have been leaks from these tailing ponds, as a Federal study from earlier this year discovered chemicals from these ponds in the groundwater and in the river.

“They found also not only are those tailings ponds leaking, but it looks like it is flowing pretty much from those tailings ponds, through the ground and into the Athabasca River,” Bill Donahue, a scientist with the oil sands advisory committee told CBC News in February.

Well the problem with these tar sands isn't going to go away anytime soon, but whereas the time needed to completely reclaim the water and land from these tailings ponds has apparently been measured in centuries, Todesco's new sand filters could do it in just decades.

According to Todesco's research, the main toxins in oil sands tailings are Naphthenic acids (NAs), which are very difficult to biodegrade. The 'slow sand bioreactors' she developed - which use sand filters with a bacterial 'biofilm' on top - degrade these Naphthenic acids 14 times faster than current methods.

She discusses the development of these new filters in the video below:

Todesco advanced to the international competition for the Stockholm Junior Water Prize after she was awarded the Canadian Stockholm Junior Water Prize in June of this year, when she participated in the Canada Wide Science Fair. Making the journey to Stockholm to pit her new filters against other science projects from around the world, Todesco was awarded the top prize by Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria. The prize includes $15,000 US for Todesco, and an award of $5,000 to her school, Queen Elizabeth High School, in Calgary, Alberta.

There is apparently little rest after this young scientist's return home, though. Since she won the Canada Google Science Fair prize in July, Todesco will be headed off to California later this week, to meet up with the other finalists of the Google Science Fair, to find out who takes home the top international prizes.

(Image and ceremony video courtesy: Stockholm International Water Institute. Research video courtesy: Hayley Todesco/Google Science Fair.)

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