User talk:Joeho604

The oil sands in Alberta, Canada, covering over 100000 km2, produce over 1.3 million barrels of bitumen per day [1]. Extraction of bitumen by surface mining of oil sands requires large amount of water and hydrocarbon solvents. The resulting byproduct creates large volumes of water, sands, clays, residual hydrocarbons, heavy metals, naphtha diluents, and naphthenic acids, which are termed as tailings. Due to operational policies preventing zero discharge of any liquids into the environment, these fine tailings are collected and confined into settling basins to create tailings ponds [1]. Despite the toxicity of tailings, microbial communities exist in tailings pond, which aid to accelerate tailings sedimentation while being able to degrade certain compounds in the tailings.