Toward sustainable remediation of oil sands fine Tailings-A review

Significant quantities of tailings are produced during the extraction of bitumen from oil sands. Tailings are stored in tailings ponds for several years before they can be appropriately managed. Current fine tailings management approaches include mechanical and/or chemical amendments of fine tailings (FT) to speed up tailings reclamation. However, complex structures of fine tailings, stringent tailings management regulations, failure in production of trafficable deposits with current FT reclamation technologies and biogenic gas (e.g., CH4) generations have prompted the re-evaluation of current FT remediation technologies and exploration of alternative biological treatments (e.g., bioaugmentation and biostimulation). Biological treatments have proven to effectively remediate environmental pollutants by creating favourable environments for the desire microorganisms. Thus their effects on FT reclamation have been increasingly investigated in the last two decades. Many of these studies confirmed that biological treatments can improve FT dewatering and densification. However, other studies found that not all biological treatments can effectively suppress CH4 generations or they may lead to the generation of other biogenic gases (e.g., H2S, N2O, NO). Therefore, it is critical to identify potential environmental risks associated with the biological treatments before their full-scale applications. This review revolved around two questions. First, whether bioaugmentation and biostimulation methods can improve FT reclamation. Secondly, what are the potential environmental issues that may arise from the applications of biological treatments. To address these questions, the existing peer-reviewed documents on fine tailings management were carefully reviewed to provide an introduction to the currently practiced FT reclamation technologies. Further discussions on biological treatments and their potentials and limitations were also presented. Finally, the review highlighted the knowledge gap in the area of biological treatments of FT and provided recommendations for future research.