Land and Water Approaches for Reclamation of Process Water

Process water is highly complex mixture of salts, metals, ammonia and organic compounds. The complex matrix of process water, its toxicity to organisms and recalcitrance of its constituents require treatment using conventional and advanced processes for its safe release to the environment. Foremost challenges are to develop advanced water treatments to combine with natural attenuation processes and remediation methods and implement them on-site with cost effectiveness and efficiency. These processes must then be adaptable to meet the requirements of legacy and future energy systems in a changing climate and regulatory environment. This research will result in integration of achieved knowledge into land and water management options for industry and into the land and water reclamation regulatory framework; development of processes and policies for safe release of process water into the environment and; development of process water treatments for use of water in end pit lakes and constructed wetlands.

Researchers are:

Developing biofiltration systems using indigenous microorganisms, native materials as bed media and gravity as part of the energy source.
Applying low cost, high capacity adsorbents to remove contaminants of concerns from process waters.
Assessing the performance of solar driven and catalytic advanced oxidation processes using different oxidants and catalysts.
Developing non-depletive extraction methods to determine organic pollutant bioavailability.
Investigating engineered passive processes for process water reclamation using constructed wetlands and end pit lakes.

PIs: Mohamed Gamal El-Din, M Anne Naeth, Dev Jennings

HQP: Abdallatif Abdalrham, Chelsea Benally, Pamela Chelme-Ayala, Rongfu Huang, Lingjun Meng, Selamawit Messele, Lei Zhang