Separation of oil sands process water organics and inorganics and examination of their acute toxicity using standard in-vitro bioassays

Abstract Oil sands process water (OSPW) contains complex components of inorganics and organics. This is the first study that separated OSPW inorganic and organic fractions and examined their relative acute toxicity when compared with the original whole OSPW using an in-vitro cell-based bio-indicator system. The separation of OSPW inorganic and organic fractions would be conducive to the understanding of the toxic contribution of organic and inorganic fractions as well as the identification and treatment of organic fractions. In this research, we demonstrated that the highest organic fraction extraction was obtained using HLB solid phase extraction with 95.4 ± 0.7% of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and 90.0 ± 5.3% of naphthenic acid (NA) recovered from OSPW, which were higher than those obtained using the traditional dichloromethane liquid-liquid extraction (48.8 ± 0.2% of DOC and 81.0 ± 2.6% of NA recovery) or other SPE cartridges tested. We also reported the first isolation method for OSPW inorganic fraction by removing 96.1 ± 0.2% of DOC in OSPW using granular activated carbon. The difference of other parameters such as pH, alkalinity, conductivity, and concentration of detected ions between OSPW and isolated inorganic fraction was negligible. The acute toxicity of whole OSPW, separated OSPW inorganic fraction and organic fraction, and the reconstituted fractions were assessed using in-vitro bioassays with RAW 264.7 mouse macrophage cell lines. OSPW organic fraction demonstrated significant cytotoxicity at 14 mg/L O2-NA and affected the cellular metabolic activity at 10 mg/L of O2-NAs. No significant cytotoxicity or effect on cellular metabolic activity was observed for whole OSPW, OSPW inorganic fraction and the reconstituted fractions. Overall, this study provides the procedure for the isolation of the major components of OSPW (i.e., organics and inorganics), which allows the assessment of their relative toxicological effects using a standard in-vitro bioassay and would allow more accurate characterization and treatment study for each fraction in OSPW.