AUGUST 2013
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business elite canada
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tems will be in place, which
will intercept and thicken the
tailings, or leftover residue
from bitumen refining. Site
reclamation and remediation,
a continuous process over the
life of the project, will bring
back native plants to exhaust-
ed sites. Water fowl deterrent
systems will protect local mi-
grant birds.
Imperial is setting a tone for
environmental planning in the
region, but Rolheiser down-
plays whether the innovations
have paved the way for bench-
marks in the oil sands indus-
try, chalking up the many
good projects they deploy as
merely due diligence.
“Our approach is easily de-
scribed as design-one, build
multiple,” he said. “The Ke-
arl expansion phase, which is
currently under construction,
will be a carbon copy of the
existing Kearl initial develop-
ment. “What that does is you
only have to do engineering
once rather than twice. It also
brings new production in a
more gradual manner. There’s
inherent advantages, rather
than bringing 345,000 bar-
rels a day to market in a single
stroke, to doing that over a
phased period of time. That
allows you to tailor and match
growth to market conditions.”
