Rather than taking water from the North Saskatchewan River, Suncor draws about nine million litres of wastewater per day from the City of Edmonton’s Gold Bar Wastewater Treatment Facility.
Suncor understands that fresh, clean water is a critical natural resource. As part of the company’s oil sands operations – current and planned – water is used for bitumen separation, generation of steam and cooling, and as process water during upgrading.
Suncor's Edmonton refinery
The goal, however, is to draw as little fresh water as reasonably possible in these operations, and to return the water to the ecosystems at levels that meet or do better than regulatory standards.
One of the first examples of the company’s leadership in water conservation and recycling is the award-winning Gold Bar project at the company’s Edmonton refinery.
Rather than taking water from the North Saskatchewan River, the refinery currently draws about nine million litres of wastewater per day from the City of Edmonton’s Gold Bar Wastewater Treatment Facility.
Using membrane filtration at the Gold Bar plant, solids and other high molecular materials that are dissolved in the water are blocked, while water and lower molecular particles pass through; supplying the clean water Suncor needs.
The recycled water is sent along a 5.5-kilometre pipeline – the first of its kind in Canada – to the refinery. Along the way, surplus water is used by ski clubs to make snow in the winter and city parks and golf courses for irrigation in the summer.