Deposition thickness and evaporative drying for oil sands tailings in northern Alberta
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Directive 074 issued by Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) requires that fine tailings materials deposited each year must achieve a minimum undrained shear strength of 5 kPa within one year following deposition. Challenged with this requirement, oil sands owners and operators in Alberta, Canada, are evaluating several opportunities for tailings dewatering. One opportunity is taking advantage of the evaporation potential, following deposition, to assist with dewatering tailings. Three types of tailings, namely, non-segregated tailings (NST), mature fine tailings (MFT), and treated thickened tailings (TT) were generally produced by Shell Canada Limited’s Albian Sands Energy operation with different treatment technologies. These three types of tailings have various consolidation behaviours and initial solids contents, which imply that the tailings deposition thickness will be different from each other in order to achieve the ERCB-D 074 requirements while utilising evaporative drying to dewater the fluid tailings. The average annual precipitation and potential evaporation are approximately 470 and 640 mm, respectively in the northern Alberta area. A simplified methodology based on tailings consolidation properties, meteorological data, and initial state of tailings deposits is presented in this paper to determine appropriate fine tailings deposition thicknesses, in the context of the exceedance probability of achieving the desired solids content (and hence undrained shear strength), for different times of the year. The maximum yearly deposition thickness with 80% probability of exceedance is approximately 200 cm for NST with enhanced initial deposition solids content, approximately 160 cm for enhanced TT, and approximately 144 cm for enhanced MFT. The methodology presented in this paper can be used to develop understanding for potential tailings deposition thickness that will have a high probability of achieving the target solids contents and shear strengths due to evaporative drying. Site-specific conditions can then be used to optimise fine tailings management.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it