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Geotechnical News • December 2013
41
WASTE GEOTECHNICS
Landmark research on oil sands mine closure landforms
underway at the University of Saskatchewan
Vivian Giang
Dr. S. Lee Barbour is a salt of the
earth kind of man, figuratively and
quite literally.
In 1997, the University of Saskatch-
ewan Professor of Civil & Geological
Engineering was simulating patterns
of salinization in Saskatchewan when
environmental scientists from Syn-
crude Canada Ltd. approached him to
conduct research on salinity problems
they were facing in the overburden
shales of their oil sands operations.
“We began our first instrumented land-
form in 1998, looking into how water
moved within reclaimed landforms
and how this affected salinity in the
area,” says Barbour. He continued to
work with Syncrude on their salt issue,
but over the years, the research began
expanding into other areas of concern.
“Our major questions regarding salt
slowly turned toward the capability
of the reclamation covers to support
upland forests,” explains Barbour.
In 2000, he initiated a collaborative
multidisciplinary research program
into the performance of reclamation
soil covers at Syncrude’s oil sands
mine sites, a program which lasted
12 years. Near the end of this study,
Syncrude approached him again, this
time with the idea of establishing an
NSERC Industrial Research Chair
(IRC) program.
Barbour, an expert in the areas of
contaminant transport in saturated and
unsaturated soils and in mine waste
reclamation, discussed a few research
ideas for the Chair with Syncrude, but
the topic of how water moves through
the reclaimed landscape following
mine closure was of particular interest
to industry. The oil sands industry uses
open pit mining methods that result
in hundreds of square kilometres of
disturbed land, much of it covered by
new landforms comprised of vari-
ous forms of mining waste. Oil sands
operators have developed designs
for progressive reclamation of these
landscapes, including the use of end
pit lakes or wetlands as methods to
collect surface and groundwater from
these landforms for eventual release.
Barbour proposed an investigation
into ways of tracking the long-term
hydrogeological evolution of these
landforms, including the development
of novel methods of monitoring water
movement and chemical transport in
these upland structures for the IRC.
In 2012, Barbour was awarded an
NSERC Industrial Research Chair in
Hydrogeological Characterization of
Oil Sands Mine Closure Landforms.
Funded by Syncrude with matching
funds from NSERC, the research pro-
gram is worth $2.6 million and focuses
on developing better tools to track and
monitor the migration of groundwa-
ter released from reclaimed oil sands
mine landforms. Specifically, he has
been investigating the transport and
fate of water in two watersheds within
reclaimed land at Syncrude’s Mildred
Lake facility, north of Fort McMurray.
According to Barbour, the research
One of Dr. Lee Barber’s research field sites is located on a watershed that is part
of Syncrude’s permanently reclaimed land at the company’s Mildred Lake facility,
35 kilometres north of Fort McMurray. The area depicted in the photo is known as
the South Bison Hills.