The Tar Sands Catastrophe

"I look at what is happening to our traditional hunting lands, and I lie awake at night. I worry that this is not just the end of our way of life, but the end of all of our lives." - Former Chief Al Lameman, Beaver Lake Cree First Nation

The Athabasca oil sands deposit represents the second largest known deposit of oil in the world - after Saudi Arabia. There are estimated to be more than a trillion barrels of oil embedded in the sands, with an estimated 315 billion barrels considered to be recoverable.⁽¹⁾ Production of synthetic crude oil from the tar sands is well under way – Alberta is producing about 1.3 million barrels of dirty oil per day.⁽²⁾ That amount is expected to double or triple in the next few years, based on recent massive private investment in these projects.

The environmental liabilities that result from the various steps in oil sands extraction and refining process include:

Destruction of the boreal forest eco-system
Damage to the Athabasca watershed
Heavy consumption of natural gas
Creation of toxic tailings ponds
Increased release of greenhouse gases

i. Destruction of the boreal forest eco-system

All of the oil sands leases slated for development are located in the boreal forest. The boreal forest is particularly valuable for its ability to store large amounts of carbon in its bogs, peat, soil, and trees. The destruction of boreal forest reduces the earth’s capacity to store carbon and releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as it is destroyed. The currently proposed oil sands projects, if all were to be activated, would directly remove an area of boreal forest eco-system twice the size of Ireland.⁽³⁾ Destruction of the forest eliminates the habitat for birds, fish, and mammals, including caribou, bear, deer, moose, wolves, coyotes, lynx, wolverine, beaver, fisher, marten, muskrat, and squirrels. Reclamation is not a credible solution.

ii. Damage to the Athabasca water shed

Two to four and a half barrels of water are required to produce a barrel of oil from the tar sands.⁽⁴⁾ Water is used to create the slurry of bitumen and oil that is heated and processed. Water is also disposed of through Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage method of extraction where steam is pumped into the ground to cause bitumen to flow into a lower pipe for removal. For every barrel of oil produced approximately one barrel of water is contaminated in the process and deposited into a tailings pond.⁽⁵⁾

At present, large water allocations from the Athabasca River are assigned to industrial use. A recent Alberta government report concluded that: “Over the long term, the Athabasca River may not have sufficient flows to meet the needs of all the planned mining operations and maintain adequate instream flows.”⁽⁶⁾ This is one of Canada’s largest rivers.

Water impacts threaten fish, wildlife, downstream communities, and transportation in the McKenzie delta.⁽⁷⁾ The toxicity of the tailings ponds also represent threats to local aquifers and to the quality of water in the Athabasca River due to the danger of seepage or a sudden and large catastrophic failure of a pond’s enclosure. Already there have been reports of unusually high incidence of certain kinds of cancer in the populations living downstream.⁽⁸⁾

iii. Heavy consumption of natural gas

Natural gas is burned to heat the bitumen in the tar sands in order to extract the liquid oil. The energy equivalent of one barrel of oil in natural gas is needed to produce three barrels of synthetic crude. Producing a barrel of oil from the oil sands requires approximately one thousand cubic feet of natural gas.

Natural gas is a fossil fuel, and when it burns to create heat it adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. But the additional concern is that natural gas releases less carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced than oil does - especially heavy oil, or synthetic crude. So, a relatively clean non-renewable fossil fuel is being burned to create a very dirty fossil fuel.⁽⁹⁾

iv. Creation of toxic tailings ponds

The “tailings” from the bitumen retrieval and refining processes include sand, silt and clay mixed with leftover hydrocarbons and other toxic substances. Tailings are being created at a rate of 2,000 or so litres per barrel of bitumen, resulting in about 1.8 billion litres of tailings every day. In May of 2008, tailings ponds covered approximately 130 km2 of Alberta.⁽¹⁰⁾

Tailings ponds include substances of concern for the water quality that discharge to surface waters:

salts
elevated sodium, chloride, sulphate
elevated total dissolved solids, pH, conductivity and alkalinity
lower calcium and magnesium (soft water)
variable levels of trace metals, including boron, arsenic and strontium
elevated ammonia
naphthenic acids, phenols, hydrocarbons
and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
other acute and chronic toxicants⁽¹¹⁾

In many cases, huge ponds sit with very short berms separating them from the Athabasca River. The Athabasca is the source river of the McKenzie watershed – downstream are communities that depend on the river for their water and livelihood. It is the principal source of food fish for Aboriginal communities.

In April of 2008, considerable press coverage arose when 500 ducks landed on the Syncrude tailings pond and died. Syncrude did not report the incident and it only became public because of an anonymous tip. Provincial regulations require the use of scarecrows and soundmakers to attempt to divert the birds from the ponds, but these were not functioning at the time. A member of the Sierra Club of Alberta, Jeh Custer, started a private prosecution against Syncrude in 2008. A private prosecution for an environmental office is a legal proceeding where an individual attempts to enforce an environmental statute, in circumstances where the Crown prosecutors fail to do so. Such private prosecutions almost always fail. But they serve to embarrass governments who are not doing their job. On February 10th both Canada and Alberta commenced formal court proceedings against Syncrude for the same offences. If convicted, Syncrude could face a maximum $300,000 fine.

v. The release of greenhouse gases

There are three main sources of greenhouse gas increases resulting from tar sands extractions:

Release of carbon from the living boreal forest as it is destroyed.
Burning of natural gas, itself a fossil fuel, in the refining process
The carbon released from the bitumen itself.

Because of the huge amount of greenhouse gas release in the process of creating synthetic crude oil, Alberta produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions per capita than the Canadian average and six times the West European average.

The earth’s atmosphere currently contains about 459 ppm CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases.⁽¹²⁾ At that elevated level we are now into the danger zone. It is well understood that as the concentrations of CO2 approach 550 ppm there is near certainty that the earth will warm 2 degrees, and will probably warm 3 degrees, an amount of warming that would be fully catastrophic. Over the next 30 years as the tar sands are exploited under current plans, this one source alone will add about 65 ppm of carbon dioxide to earth’s atmosphere. Even if nobody else on earth created carbon dioxide over the next 30 years, exploitation of the tar sands will push the level of CO2 in our atmosphere to 525 ppm. This one source will single-handedly cancel out all worldwide efforts to control climate change. All the good effects of conservation, conversion to solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and other expensive unconventional energy sources will be for nothing, because this one industrial project will continue pushing up the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases. All the planning and sacrifice by the rest of the world will be cancelled out by this one industry.

And, in the course of exploiting the tar sands and destroying the boreal forest, the treaty rights of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation will be rendered meaningless.
(1) Alberta Department of Energy, “Alberta Oil Sands 2006 (updated December 2007,) Edmonton, AB, 2007
(2) Nikiforuk, Andrew, Tar Sands - Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, Greystone Books, Vancouver, Canada, 2008 (in collaboration with the David Suzuki Foundation). As of December 2007, there were approximately 4,264 oil sands agreements within the province, totaling 64,919 square kilometres. http://www.energy.gov.ab.ca/OilSands/792.asp
(3) Sierra Club website, “Tar Sands and the Boreal Forest,” 2006:   http:www.tarsandstimeout.ca/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36&Item
(4) Sierra Club website, “Tar Sands and Water,” 2006:   “http:www.tarsandstimeout.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Item...
(5) Sierra Club website, “Tar Sands and Water,” 2006:   “http:www.tarsandstimeout.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Item...
(6) Government of Alberta, Oil Sands Ministerial Strategy Committee, “Investing in our future: Responding to the rapid growth of the oil sands development,” 2006, p. 112
(7) Sierra Club website, “Living Downstream - Growing Water Concerns in the NWT,” 2006: “http:www.tarsandstimeout.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Item...
(8) “Oilsands-area hamlet supports whistleblower MD – Physician raised concerns about high cancer rates downstream from oil projects” http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2007/03/05/alberta-doctor-070305.html.
(9) Polaris Institute website, “Dirty Little Secret: Canada’s Global Warming Engine,” Alberta Tar sands Profile Series, 2007. See also George Monbiot, Heat, Anchor Books, Canadian Edition 2007, page 82.
(10) Pembina, Fact or Fiction, at p. 41.
(11) Jennifer Grant, Fact or Fiction: Oil Sands Reclamation, Drayton Valley, AB: Pembina Institute, 2008, p.36
(12) Monbiot, Bring on the Apocalypse, Anchor Books, 2008, page 44.