While oil sands deposits in Canada contain as much as 173 billion barrels of economically-viable oil, only about a million barrels are produced each day due to the complex extraction process.

With the oil industry in Canada expecting to increase production to four million barrels a day by 2020, there is a growing need to not only treat the massive amounts of water that are used in the extraction process, but to also tackle the greenhouse gas emissions that are a result of the energy used while mining.

Now scientists at GE Global Research, which is the hub of technology development for all of GE’s businesses, are partnering with the University of Alberta and Alberta Innovates Technology Futures – Alberta’s technology incubator – to use nanotechnology to create a new filtration system that tackles the twin problems of water treatment and carbon capture. The work has the potential to cut carbon emissions during the extraction process by 25%.

As the Canadian oil producers explain on their website, in oil sands, the oil is as thick as peanut butter and doesn’t flow. Called ‘bitumen’, it must be processed to take on the characteristics of light crude oil. It can either be mined at the surface – which only works for 20% of the operations in Canada – or by drilling deep underground wells.

In drilling, steam or other solvents must be injected so that the thick oil can be pumped to the surface. And it’s that process – turning the water to steam, pumping it in and out, and then upgrading the material into light crude – that uses a great deal of energy and a great deal of water. It reportedly generates two to four times the amount of greenhouse gases when compared to conventional oil production.
GE already has carbon capture technologies that are part of its “integrated gasification combined cycle” technology used in coal plants.

In these systems, chemical scrubbers filter out pollutants to make the coal burning plants cleaner. At the same time, CO2 can be separated and stored. In the future, the nanotechnology research now underway could also support CO2 separation and capture in power plants using the ‘cleaner coal’ integrated gasification combined cycle process.

 At the heart of the new nanotechnology research are naturally occurring zeolites identified by the University of Alberta. These materials are rocks with molecularly sized pores, which allow small molecules to enter while excluding larger molecules. GE scientists aim to form these materials into membranes that can be used for high temperature gas separation – and to filter contaminated water.

Anthony Ku, a chemical engineer and project leader for GE Global Research on the CO2 capture project, said now that the University has identified the material’s potential, GE will “figure out how to build a prototype that will be tested in the field.”

Currently, GE’s water filtration technologies are already in use in Alberta helping the Great Divide Oil Sands Partnership recycle up to 98 percent of the water used in their extraction process.