An article titled ‘Billions of bacteria produce nickel and clean water’ says that Vancouver’s BioteQ Environmental Technologies Inc. has developed a process called anaerobic respiration where bacteria “breathe in” sulphur and “exhale” sulphide, a substance used to crystallize nickel remnants in water generated in Xstrata PLC’s Raglan Mine, near Kattiniq, Nunavik – which nickel remnants can be extracted and sold along with the rest of the mine’s production – and that armed with new funding from the Canadian National Research Council “BioteQ is adapting its method for one of Canada’s toughest environmental conundrums: how to deal with massive amounts of contaminated water generated by the oilsands in Alberta”.  The article also says Brad Marchant, CEO of BioteQ is confident of a solution by this time next year, and quotes him as saying “A lot of water problems are the same (across) industries”.  To put experimental oilsands remediation into perspective, the article reports that this remediation effort has received recent Canadian Federal Government commitments of at least $1 billion.

While there is no assurance that such a process will work in the Canadian Oil Sands, and the article itself quotes at least one doubter, this is an interesting development that I think bears watching.  The Canadian Oil Sands represent approximately 1/3 of the world’s known oil reserves in circumstances where the referenced article says new UN data largely blame the oilsands for a 4% jump in carbon emissions to 747 megatonnes in 2007.  It seems inconceivable to me that the Canadian Oil Sands will not be developed.  That technology is required to ensure the ‘greenness’ of extraction going forward is not surprising.  That such technology will be developed, while not certain, surely can be assigned a high probability given the need to extract that oil commercially combined with scientific ingenuity.

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