Oilsands tailings recycling plant may launch next year
Edmonton-based Titanium Corp. receives patent for process
By Dave Cooper, Edmonton JournalOctober 16, 2012
Zircon — a fine, but heavy mineral — sifts through fingers like sand. Titanium Corp. has developed a process to extract the valuable mineral from oilsands tailings.Photograph by: Shaughn Butts, Edmonton Journal
EDMONTON — An Edmonton-based technology firm that has unlocked the secret of recovering minerals like zircon from oilsands tailings hopes to launch a commercial project next year.
Titanium Corp. ( TSXV:TIC) said Tuesday it has been awarded a patent for the removal of bitumen from mineral concentrates and that several others patents are pending, in addition to its existing mineral extraction patents. The firm also said it is in discussions with oilsands firms that are now looking at sites and doing some preliminary planning.
“We want to get the first project going as quickly as possible and likely that will take us into next year,” said chief executive Scott Nelson.
Titanium has been doing research and development for about a decade and is ready for commercialization.
“It is maddeningly slow. This business is not for the faint of heart,” said Nelson, referring to the process of large companies going through their own reviews and engineering studies.
“We are a small company with patient shareholders.”
Provincial and federal governments are also involved because they provided millions of dollars in research funding and much of the $15 million to run a pilot plant at the federal CanmetENERGY lab in Devon.
“We have proposed that they develop a fiscal regime (to share in the expected revenue) and they have agreed and are working on that,” Nelson said.
He suggests that future plants will be joint ventures with Titanium, oilsands firms and service industry companies that would build and operate the plants. It is estimated that a bitumen, water and solvent recovery plant will cost $275 million, and a mineral recovery plant an additional $100 million.
“But there is enough bitumen and minerals at each site that there will $200 million to $300 million in revenues per year,” said Nelson. “The oilsands are long-term projects that take a lot of capital up front. But once you do it economically you have a nice business.”
Titanium’s technology handles the mineral and bitumen-rich froth treatment tailings, one of the streams that go to the tailings ponds.
“It is a little bit of a chicken and egg situation. You need to concentrate the minerals and when you do that you also concentrate the bitumen around the minerals,” he said.
The prize, potentially, is huge: recovery of up to 15 million cubic metres of water, 400,000 barrels of solvent (which now evaporates from the ponds) and up to three million barrels of bitumen at each plant every year. That means extra output for the plant and extra royalties for Alberta. Oilsands plants produce about 100 million barrels a year.
Tailings are about 85 per cent fine clay and 15 per cent coarse sands, which contain the valuable minerals. While the minerals can be separated from bitumen-free sand using electro-static equipment, at the heart of the Titanium process is its efficacy at removing bitumen, which involves the use of solvents.
The market for zircon, which is used in ceramics, industrial foundries, nuclear plants and even diamond-like zirconia, is forecast to rise sharply over the next few years. China is a prime purchaser and the price could hit $1,500 per tonne in a few years, according to research by Iluka, which produces almost a third of the world’s supply largely from mining old sand dunes. Titanium, used largely in paints, is much more common and less valuable.
The bitumen-recovery rate at oilsands plants fed by surface mines averages about 92 per cent. The rest is lost in the mines or ends up in tailings ponds. About 90 per cent of what goes into the ponds comes from the primary separation phase, when the bitumen ore is crushed and hot water added.
The resulting froth is sent to a second stage. This more concentrated stream — less than 10 per cent of total tailings — is some 50-to 60-per cent bitumen. This is the flow Titanium is targeting.
“All kinds of things happen when you put hydrocarbons in tailings ponds, so intercepting them before they get there and running them through our process has the potential to stop that — and make money doing it.”
dcooper@edmontonjournal.com
What Titanium Corp. hopes to recover from a typical oilsands plant:
Zircon: Up to 100,000 tonnes a year
Bitumen: Up to three million barrels a year
Solvent: Up to 400,000 barrels a year
Water: Up to 15 million cubic metres a year
Source: Titanium Corp.
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