The generation of tailings as a by product of the bitumen extraction process is one of the largest environmental footprints of oil sands operations. Most of the tailings treatment technologies use polymer flocculants to induce solid–liquid separation. However, due to the complex composition of tailings, conventional flocculants cannot reach the same performance achieved in other wastewater treatments. Over the last couple of decades, the oil sands industry has used acrylamide‐based flocculants to treat tailings, achieving major progress in process optimization and integration with mechanical operations, but they still could not reach the required land reclamation targets. Over the last 5 years, the group designed, synthesized, and tested several novel polymer flocculants tailored for oil sands tailings treatment. This feature article communicates recent developments in these innovative polymers. The article first provides a background on tailings generation and treatment, followed by the description of advanced polymer flocculants categorized according to their microstructures such as linear, branched, and graft. The other tailings remediation technologies and one of the initial works on modeling of tailings flocculation is discussed.

中文翻译：

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用于油砂尾矿固液分离的高级聚合物絮凝剂

沥青提取过程的副产品尾渣的产生是油砂作业最大的环境足迹之一。大多数尾矿处理技术都使用聚合物絮凝剂进行固液分离。但是，由于尾矿的复杂组成，常规絮凝剂无法达到其他废水处理所能达到的相同性能。在过去的几十年中，油砂行业已使用基于丙烯酰胺的絮凝剂处理尾矿，在工艺优化和与机械操作集成方面取得了重大进展，但仍无法达到所需的土地开垦目标。在过去的五年中，该小组设计，合成和测试了几种专为油砂尾矿处理量身定制的新型聚合物絮凝剂。这篇专题文章介绍了这些创新聚合物的最新发展。本文首先提供了尾矿的产生和处理的背景，然后介绍了根据高分子絮凝剂的微观结构（例如线性，分支和接枝）分类的高级高分子絮凝剂。讨论了其他尾矿修复技术以及关于尾矿絮凝建模的初步工作之一。