exposed to the external environment, ready to carry out some chemical business.
At Nano-tex, Soane came up with a polymers consisting of long chains with many branches; the backbones of the chains attach to the fibers in cloth, while the branches are “hydrophobic” or water-repelling. At another startup, Aclara BioSciences (now known as Monogram Biosciences), Soane used a similar technique to create surface coatings for microfluidic devices that would prevent DNA and proteins from sticking to the insides of tiny pipes and channels.
Soane sees “tunable” surface polymers as the basic technology platform at Soane Labs, the company that incubates most of Soane’s business ventures. “For each application, you need to shrink yourself down and visualize the material and think about how the molecule will be affected by the environment,” says Soane. “That’s our IP, that’s the magic.”
To understand how polymers can help with the oil sands problem, you need to know how oil extraction works in Alberta. Oil sand looks exactly the way it sounds: like mucky, black, oil-soaked mud. Companies liberate the oil by burning natural gas to heat water, then forcing the heated water through the sand. Unfortunately, the “flowback” water left over from this process contains a lot of clay particles or “fines,” and those fines are in turn coated with heavy metals, bacteria, leftover oil, and other contaminants.
It takes 1.4 metric tons of sand to produce one barrel of oil, and the process requires 10 barrels of water. All of that water—some 10 million barrels a day—is poured into the toxic lakes as a clay-rich slime, where the fines take decades to settle out.
To remediate the slime lakes, which cover 130 square kilometers, Soane has designed two types of polymers with ends that bind together like a zipper. One of the polymers has a tail section that naturally attaches to the clay fines. (Soane calls this “activating” the slime.) The other has a tail that attaches to quartz particles, i.e. sand; clean sand that’s been coated with this polymer is called “tethered.”
In the lab, if you dump tethered sand into activated slime, the ends of the polymers tangle together and the sand drags the fines to the bottom, leaving behind clean water. The precipitated material binds into inert, solid globs that, according to Soane, could be used to fill in mining pits after an area’s oil sands are depleted.
Now the company has to show that the process works in the field, on existing tailing ponds as well as water that’s just passed through oil sand. In fact, if the process can be used to clean up the water while it’s still hot, that would be a big bonus, since
