News

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Two Fridays ago, a bigwig from the Suncor oil company sat at Wayne Groot's kitchen table, where the window looks out over his cherished potato fields. They chatted about their kids, and Mr. Groot, not being the lawyer-fetching type, served tea.

But it wasn't long before the conversation turned to the true reason for the visit: Suncor wants to buy the Groot land – in particular, the patch upon which the family bungalow sits – to build an upgrader that will take the bitumen travelling from the oil sands up north and turn it into synthetic crude for the thirsty markets down south.

The night before the visit, Mr. Groot, 47, had a restless sleep. But then he's been suffering waking nights for two years now, ever since the land agent first showed up and slipped a big number his way for the acreage he'd always imagined passing on to his kids. He doesn't want to sell; his family has been farming the rich soil northeast of Edmonton for three generations. It pains him to think of smokestacks plopped on some of the finest agricultural fields in the country.

But he knows that everything is headed in that direction, as relentlessly as the bitumen flowing down the pipes from Fort McMurray, where 42,000 hectares of nearby boreal forest have already been hacked so raw and bare that people say they don't like to fly over it any more.

And to think that when he was a boy, on vacation with his parents, he'd once been excited at the sight of Suncor's busy oil sands mine. Back then, Suncor was on its own, pushing out 50,000 barrels on a good day. Now, with daily production at 1.2 million barrels and growing, and 40 companies with a stake in the sands, the problem has drifted into Mr. Groot's backyard: Pending provincial approval, there are plans to build as many as 10 upgraders within a few kilometres of his farm.

“We're exploiting this province way too fast,” says Mr. Groot. “In 50 years, we will know a lot more about what this has done. But then there won't be any more land left.”

This is what angers environmentalists and an increasingly vocal segment of Albertans: The oil sands projects have grown in number and size so suddenly that there hasn't been time to consider the long-term environmental costs. Groups like the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental think tank, have proposed a moratorium on new projects until technology can catch up. Greenpeace, which opened an Edmonton office last summer, is campaigning for a complete halt to all development.

Mike Hudema, the Medicine Hat native who returned to Canada to run the Greenpeace office, says: “What is the cost of this? Right now, we are in the early stages and already it is completely out of control.”

There's no getting around it: Oil produced from the bitumen lying in the sand under Alberta's boreal forest is one of the dirtiest fuels in the world. Under current conditions, extracting one barrel of synthetic crude from a mine requires roughly two to four barrels of fresh water from the nearby Athabasca River (an amount top water scientists say the river cannot sustain), along with 750 cubic feet of non-renewable natural gas and about four tonnes of tarry sand and “overburden” – the industry term for what Mr. Groot calls soil.

Steaming it out of the ground – a process that will dominate most of the future expansion since the vast majority of bitumen is found too deep to be mined – creates a crisscross of pipes across the wilderness and requires large amounts of energy to boil the necessary water. The impact of so-called “in situ” extraction on groundwater supply and quality, environmentalists say, is uncertain.

What's more, the oil sands are easily cast as a climate-change villain: In 2006, researchers at Simon Fraser University found that the mining and upgrading of oil sands bitumen created five times as many greenhouse-gas emissions as would come from producing oil from a conventional well.

Barring new technology, and if production increases, as predicted, to four million barrels a day by 2020, it will be virtually impossible for Canada to meet its international climate-change commitments.

Mining the Alberta wilderness compounds the problem by stripping the boreal forest, which naturally sucks up carbon dioxide. About 3,000 square kilometres of wilderness is leased for mining; another 35,000 square kilometres could be sliced up for in situ development.

The developed wetlands can't be restored to their original state, and a recent environmental report by the National Energy Board said it's still unclear whether current plans to reclaim the land will create self-sustaining ecosystems in the long term.

A growing network of pipelines will also confine animals in the area, particularly the migratory woodland caribou, already considered a threatened species. More seriously, there is growing concern about health issues, including reports of increased cancer rates among aboriginal residents living downstream from the sands.

The most dramatic visible legacy of mining the oil sands – and an example environmentalists cite of the uncertainty of the long-term impact – are the large, manufactured lakes that store the cloudy waste water left over from the extraction process.

They are called tailings “ponds,” but collectively they cover an area greater than 50 square kilometres. Today, says Randy Mikula, the head of tailings research at Natural Resources Canada who has been studying the problem since the 1980s, there is enough suspended clay floating in the ponds to fill a ditch 20 metres wide and 10 metres deep from Fort McMurray to Edmonton to Ottawa.

They were never supposed to get this large, explains Dr. Mikula. When oil sands mining began in the late 1960s, it was assumed that the clay in the ponds would settle in a few years and the hardened material could be returned to the landscape. But this didn't happen: Many scientists now believe the tailings-pond clay will take 500 to 1,000 years to settle on its own.

The easiest solution currently involves dumping the wet tailings into the pits left over by the mines and topping them with fresh water. But researchers believe this will create a series of dead lakes, on the bottom of which no life can exist. “Most people in the industry see end-pit lakes as a last resort,” says Dr. Mikula.

Oil companies, like Suncor, are investing a lot of energy into figuring how to solidify the tailings. The company has made progress using gypsum, created from the sulphur that is a by-product of the extraction process.

But Dr. Mikula, whose team will begin commercially testing a method that spins the tailings at high speed to remove the water, says no solution is certain at this point. By 2010, Suncor says it will have reclaimed its first tailings pond, a 217-hectare body of waste water that sits next to the Athabasca River, but the company is doing so by moving most of the watery tailings to another, newer, lake.

On the other hand, Gord Lambert, the company's vice-president of sustainable development, points out the industry has made significant progress in reducing its per-barrel energy impacts.

It has reduced carbon emissions by as much as 50 per cent, improved water recycling and, in Suncor's case, is reducing the use of gas-guzzling dump trucks by piping the bitumen in liquid form directly from the mine face.

Mr. Lambert predicts technology is going to solve most of the problems. Given the high price of natural gas and government-imposed limitations on water use, he says, oil companies have an economic interest in improving their environmental footprint. And the oil sands – the first development of its kind of the world – is a work in progress.

“One misconception is that the future is going to be an extension of the past,” Mr. Lambert says. “The pace at which innovation is occurring is underestimated.”

Jay Nagendran, Alberta's assistant deputy minister of oil sands environmental management, also argues that the province is wrongly criticized for being lax on industry regulations. He admits that the province's limits on water use from the Athabasca River stops short of prohibiting it completely during low-flow winter periods – as several experts have argued is necessary to protect the ecosystem. But the restrictions still mean companies will face water shortages requiring them to develop other alternatives.

The province, he says, recently made Syncrude spend $700-million to reduce its sulphur emissions. And companies that fail to reduce their CO2 emissions over a certain amount must pay into a technology fund – though this is long way from applying a tax on all emissions, as many environmentalists propose.

Developing the oil sands, Mr. Nagendran says, can't happen without a tradeoff. “If you want to sustain a pristine environment but you want to dig up the oil sands,” he says, “that's not possible.”

But relying on future technology to take care of a current problem – as industry promises it will – is an optimistic, yet-to-be-proven prediction. One of the most promising ideas for reducing CO2 emissions is to capture the gas and inject it underground for storage, but this technology is very expensive and, according to the National Energy Board, likely decades away from being put into practice.

No matter what solutions come along, says Robert Steedman, the NEB's chief environmental officer, the oil sands will require a huge clean-up project.

“It just reflects the scale and scope of this whole endeavour,” he says. “The resource is there, and we can get it out, and there's going to be a long-term piece of work to tidy up afterwards.”

The concerns about how efficiently that work will get done is expected to be a key issue in the provincial election. And the outcry will only get louder as projects roll steadily across the boreal forest.

Back at his farm outside Edmonton, Wayne Groot ended his conversation with the Suncor representative and the company's land agent by refusing to consider a new dollar figure for his land. “They asked us what we wanted,” he says. “And we said, ‘We really want you to go build somewhere else.'”

But he knows they'll be back. His neighbour has already sold his property to Petro-Canada; in a few years, if the company gets approval, he'll be looking out his kitchen window, across the fields, at the smoke and lights of a new upgrader.

Eventually, he suspects, that for the sake of his family, they'll have no choice but to take the money and leave.

“Some people would probably say, ‘You're lucky. You can sell your land for a lot of money and live the good life.'

“I thought I was living the good life already.”