Clemson researchers designing wetlands to clean mining water

Clemson professors John Rodgers and James Castle will let the politicians and interest groups fight over the route of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline while they and their graduate students try to solve the problem of how to clean the virtual flood of water needed to extract billions of barrels of oil from the sands of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin.  Canadian law requires that each section of a mining company’s lease be returned to a state equivalent to what it was before mining began.  All that mining water, loaded with hydrocarbons, has to be cleaned before it can be released back into the eighth largest lake in Canada—Lake Athabasca and its tributaries.