There are currently 470,000 wells in Alberta, of which around 174,000 are inactive or closed and require remediation of salt and hydrocarbon contaminants. Through this project, the University of Calgary plans to engineer and optimize an electrokinetic soil remediation system that uses direct current to remove salts and hydrocarbons from Alberta’s oil and gas sites. This process has the potential to reduce GHG emissions and remediation costs by over 80% compared to conventional methods.
Promising field trials of the technology on a salt-contaminated site were conducted in 2023 and 2024, and continued into 2025. This proposed ERA project will expand and improve the system’s remediation capacity by leveraging insights from previous results to simultaneously remove both salt and hydrocarbons.