Developing long-term carbon control strategies is important in energy intensive industries such as the oil sands operations in Alberta. We examine the use of cogeneration to satisfy the energy demands of oil sands operations in Alberta in the context of carbon management. This paper evaluates the role of cogeneration in meeting Provincial carbon management goals and discusses the arbitrary char...

New data on the settling velocity of artificial sediments and natural sands at high concentrations are presented. The data are compared with a widely used semiempirical Richardson and Zaki equation (Trans. Inst. Chem. Eng. 32 (1954) 35), which gives an accurate measure of the reduction in velocity as a function of concentration and an experimentally determined empirical power n. Here, a simple ...

Fort McKay is an Aboriginal community located in the midst of oil sand development in North East Alberta. Increasing emissions of key air contaminants from oil sands industry are monitored and regulated by provincial government. Though industrial odours have long been a cause of complaint in the region, to date odours have not been monitored or regulated by provincial governments, creating esca...

Proton NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) measurements were made of T1 and T2 relaxation times of water in saturated sands containing varying amounts of sorbed oil on the grain surfaces. The porosity, surface area, and grain density of the sands and the relaxation times of the extracted pore water were also determined experimentally. Sorption of oil changed the relaxation time of water in the sat...

Modern economies are dependent on fossil energy, yet as conventional resources are depleted, an increasing fraction of that energy is coming from unconventional resources such as tar sands. These resources usually require more energy for extraction and upgrading, leaving a smaller fraction available to society, and at a higher cost. Here we present a calculation of the energy return on investme...

P olycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are a ubiquitous class of hundreds of organic compounds composed of two or more aromatic rings that are released naturally and from human activities. Natural sources of PAHs include forest fires, oil seeps, and volcanic eruptions; anthropogenic sources include burning of fossil fuels and wood, production of coke and charcoal, petroleum refining, and petr...

In this paper, we describe and evaluate a new distributed architecture for clinical decision support called SANDS (Service-oriented Architecture for NHIN Decision Support), which leverages current health information exchange efforts and is based on the principles of a service-oriented architecture. The architecture allows disparate clinical information systems and clinical decision support syst...

The extent to which pollution from tar sands industrial activities in northeastern Alberta, Canada affects ecosystem and human health is a matter of growing concern that is exacerbated by uncertainty. In this paper we determine whether physical and ecological changes that result from tar sands industrial activities are detectable. We analyze a diverse set of environmental data on water and sedi...