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CAROL
Suncor Oil Sands Tour
- We are in Fort McMurray today and tomorrow to look at oil sands and its been an interesting day, here are the things I learned today:
1. How economics play a role in oil sands (if the amount per barrel is under 50-60, it will be difficult to make a profit)
2. We looked at mines today and the heavy machine that comes behind the scenes to get everything done.
3. Learned a lot about geology today
4. Finally, we were able to see many statues and many marked places.
- In general, it was a lot of fun. I anticipate that tomorrow will be just as fun, Will update more tomorrow
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CHINMOYEE
What I remember Fort Mcmurray Day 1
We went on a tour of the Suncore Mine . The mine covered a large area . One side of the river was the refinery and the other side contained most of the mine. The trucks and giant shovels had created an artificial canyon.
Tailings pond– waste
Pipe line in an arch when crossing Athabasca river so that if rupture occurs then the oil will flow back to special land ponds and not into the river.
Before the shovel trucks there was a conveyer belt system that needed maintainance every hour for every two hours it worked. The conveyer belt system moved . System is so large that cars can go under the ‘vehicle’ . The system even has a red light and green light.
Muskeg the rich part of the soil that contains seeds / nutrients etc . When land reclaimation occurs then barley is planted over the Muskeg to prevent soil erosion. Barley holds the soil until the seedlings can grow then the Barley dries out. –which is a good thing or else the seedlings would have to compete with barley to grow.
Oil sands history – underground oil reserve brought up by the formation of the mountains and caused the oil to mix with the sand
Oil sand – part oil / sand/ water
When oil sand is boiled the oil (bitumen ) becomes less denser than water and floats on water . This is how the oil is separated.
When oil sand is too deep and can’t be dug or someother reason . Pipelines are drilled – slant drills- until oil sand reservoir is reached then steam is pumped into the soil. The steam seperates the oil from the sand and makes it possible to collect the oil from this underground diposite.
Sweet product – without sulfur , sour product – with sulfur .
The removed sulfur is used in fertilizer – Syncrude has a fertilizer plant on site.
Housing in Ft Mc is very hard . Companies sometimes give employees 1000 extra for living expenses.
Reclaiming the land and water - The water ( the polluted fine tails ) are made fit for living organisms through applying a thin layer of pure water periodically . The pollution is supposed to settle at the bottom of the pond while the pure water remains above. Over a 20 year period Suncore hopes to achieve reclaimation of the land.
Some of the land that’s been currently claimed can’t be fit for human visitation until it has been certified that the land is safe.
During land reclaimation , the landscape is made to be hilly and not straight . consideration is placed on water drainage .
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EMILY
Tour of the Oil Sands!
Today we’re in Fort McMurray on a tour of the Oil Sands with Suncor. Today we got a tour of one of the mines and got a good luck at some of the trucks and other machinery. We learned about some of the general extraction processes and looked at some old machines that they no longer use. We also went to see some land that has now been reclaimed and has plant growth and bison living on it. We talked about strategies they use to prevent erosion and some of the measures they take to avoid contamination of surrounding rivers. It was a pretty cool day; hopefully tomorrow will be just as good.
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FAHD
Trip to Fort McMurray
Today we visited the Suncor Oil Sands in Fort McMurray courtesy of Mr. Andrew Hessel, who organized this visit called the Oil Sands Leadership Initiative. The objective of this tour was that students would visit take a tour of the oil sands and come up with biotechnology projects that would have beneficial applications for the oil sands and the environment. Today’s tour included Suncor’s reclamation pond sites, mining sites, sand pits and upgrading sites. We will continue the day 2 of this tour tomorrow.
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IMAN
Working on applyRule function which takes a rule for a given cell and applies the interaction rule causing current state of the cell to update. On visualization side and interface, today we are hoping to make 3D visualizations for few of the rules.
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JAMIE
SunCor Oil Sands Tour
- Tour of the SunCor Oil Sands Mining Facilities
- Heavy machinery!! Caterpillars are amazing cool; aka my house times 2. :)
- Tour of reclaimed sites: area with 'bison' to prove bioremediation courtesy of SynCrude
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JEREMY
Biology and Oil Sands: Finally Talking
Today we had the tremendous opportunity of touring Suncor Energy’s Oil Sands project alongside U of A and U of L iGEM teams. This was set up by Andrew Hessel as a means of bringing synthetic biology and Alberta’s biggest industry (oil and gas) one step closer to forming a partnership for future projects. It was incredibly fascinating to see the entire project of mining the bitumen along with its transportation and processing. We were able to briefly talk to one of the mining engineers Len about a topic that has been thrown back and forth with iGEM Calgary: bioremediation. He definitely accented its prevalence in this industry and how they are using some sort of nitrogen containing fertilizer alongside bacteria in order to combat this problem.
What was most interesting today, however, was when talking with Andrew, he corrected my misconception in that it was neither him nor the synthetic biologists who invited us to the field. It was the energy giants who are now starting to show interest in synthetic biology. This will prove incredibly useful for future iGEM projects and synthetic biology as a whole as these companies will may help to fund some projects provided that they can demonstrate applications within the field.
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KATIE
Duplicating the Lab and Polishing Off Activities
Today I spent some time:
- Moving a few of the activities I have permissions on to the second lab and began changing positions that some of the materials are set to when they are required to move, which will be completed tomorrow morning.
- I also spent a lot of time making new note cards and dropping them into inventory for restriction digest as well as construction so that it is possible for something to be given back at each step
One issue I discovered within construction was that the id of the individual performing the task was not kept track of so it has to be stored every time an avatar chooses particular circuit parts to ligate together. Also, the substrings for some of the circuit parts still appear to be a couple of base pairs off within construction sites so I will have to use a note card reader I have been using for tests to see what the substrings should actually be.
Tomorrow I would like to finish changing the sequencing station script so that it functions properly for the lab missions as well as general activities and I want to return to the DNA animation by the afternoon and see if it is possible to unravel the strands of DNA I have built.
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KEVIN
Fort McMurray and the oil giants
Today was our first day at Fort McMurray, touring the oil sands of Suncor Energy Inc. We, together with the iGEM team of U of Lethbridge and Edmonton, were given an extensive guide throughout the oil sands. The first glance of all the intertwined pipelines that are present in order to maneuver the precursor and the product of oil around made me dizzy, but was able to grasp some sense about how the oil was extracted and processed.
Despite of my thoughts on aiding the maintanence of pipelines via preventation of biofilms, their pipeline damages are mostly due to sand that physically degrades the performance of the pipelines.
The current efficiency, as in given output per input, is told to be about 95%. This number however seems to be way too high as they seems to lose lots of energy via steam. Maybe the extraction or the processing of oil can be improved via bacteria? Something to ponder about.
The most likely area of bacteria accomodation seems to be bioremediation. These oil companies are dedicated to preserve/restore the natural environment around their oil sands, and are looking for ways to improve on cleaning after the oils. There has to be some bacteria that mediates natural bioremediation because oil is sometimes naturally degraded over some amount of time. But where are they? Time for some hide and seek...
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MANDY
Movement of Lab Equipment to the Green Lab in Second Life
I did some further duplication of the lab equipment to the green lab. I found that I had to modify the DNA extraction activity scripts to match the new positioning and thus new coordination for the movement of the components involved in that activity. This took longer than I expected, as the rotations were also changed.
Navigational System in the Wiki
I did some modifications to the front page of the wiki:
- There is now a navigational bar that directs people to the sitemap.
- The navigational bar also will have a 'tour' that will guide people through important points on our webpage: such as the overall project, our team, etc.
- The sitemap is still under construction, it will include a description of buttons which mark the work of different sub-teams in addition to the links and brief descriptions to all the pages.
- A Clustrmap and stat counter has also been provided on the webpage for those who are interested.
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PRIMA
Fort Mac- Oil Sands Tour
Today, we arrived at the airport at 7:00, waited for the U of A students and together we headed for the oil sands tour. We visited the Suncore and Syncrude buttemen lakes, fields where mining operations were taking place and few well known landmarks of these two companies. The tour guide thoroughly explained what was going on, where we were headed and gave us a little briefing about its history. We also saw some of the HUGE machinaries used to extract tar sands and take them to the separating factory. For example, one of the machines was a massive water wheel attached to a ridiculously long conveyor belt to transport the goods.
It was also interesting to find out how much truck drivers made, how much each machine cost and how expensive each tire cost. (Apprently, one of the huge trucks alone cost 6.5 million dollars and each jumbo sized wheel cost nearly $70 000 on top of that!!!). We took a lot of pictures of the land, machines, land marks and the team. We also learned how they scare ducks on their buttemen lakes with cannons. The guides showed us how much off the land was open to mining and explained their oil reserves and compared Canada's total cost/barrel to Saudia Arabia.
Overall, we had tonnes of fun meeting the other iGEM teams, talking to the supervisors and learning about the Fort Mac oil sands. However, we didn't have a chance to sell our project to anyone yet; it was more like, they were trying to promote their businesss. Hopefully, we'll be able to talk about quorum sensing and how iGEM Calgary can build a partnership tomorrow.
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STEFAN
Second Life party!
Almost everyone was gone on the oil sands field trip but 3/4 of the Second Life team stayed back to take control. Today our supervisors were also exploring Second Life for the first time. This was great because I realized that some things in the Synthetic Kingdom couldn't be done by others so some permissions needed to be changed. One thing that was completely done today was the oil clean-up station. New features:
- Fully functional moving squid
- New plate that a person can click on to rez bacteria
- Once clicked, plate goes to sleep so people can't rez many bacteria at once
- Engineered cell disappears after a set amount of time in case to gets moved to other parts of the island
- Improved placement of oil barrels
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VICKI
*Another* description of the oilsands tour
Like most of our team today, I embarked on a very memorable adventure in the Fort McMurray oilsands. It was quite an eye-opening experience: having been in Toronto and southern Alberta for the last few years, the oilsands projects have not been featured in a positive light, so this served as an excellent opportunity to shed some light on the initiative.
We participated in a tour kindly provided by represenatives from SunCor, one of the key players in the oilsands development projects. The guides - a dedicated communications rep and a plant manager (mining engineer by training) - presented a very confident front and were well-versed enough in the subject to answer most of the questions with credibility. It must be noted that I am approaching this with some inherent bias: most of my incoming understanding of these projects was of the environmental devastation that they left in their wake, as well as how the ratio of output to input energy is much lower than most other energy-production endeavours. Many of my questions were answered, but naturally, many more also arose.
We started off with a look at some of the bitumen lakes, complete with artificial men and cannons to scare ducks away. Our attention was then directed to one of many restoration efforts, where they were able to re-grow much of the natually-occuring vegetation on previously-pillaged land. That aspect accounted for much of the focus of the tour. Indeed, the efforts are very admirable and they have been quite successful in revitalising the land (so far). Whether or not this (a) succeeds in the longer-term; and (b) erases more of the environmental footprint (land scorching, greenhouse and noxious gas release, significant changes to the landscape) requires more enquiry.
We also observed some of the excavation and mining operations, where workers mined for the oil-rich sands that would eventually undergo separation and be turned into a heavy-oil slurry. This also induced some questions - namely, how much usable/useful energy can be extracted from this, relative to the amount of energy necessary to convert the oil-sand energy into a usable/useful form. I have heard everything from 4 barrels of oil output per input barrel equivalent in energy (Pressnail, 2007) to 20 barrels output per input barrel equivalent in energy (Hale, 2009), the latter of which was quoted today (although he wasn't entirely certain of the number). This also merits further enquiry, as the 95% seems a little high (given that light oil in Southeastern Saskatchewan isn't even that usable in its raw form). Moreover, if it were a 95% efficient process, they should be able to operate comfortably even if the price of oil sinks below $50/barrel.
So, I'm currently working on a list of questions for tomorrow and checking more into their figures and statistics. It has been a very interesting experience that is well worth the time and distance. More details to come tomorrow!
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