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Oil sands pollutes water?

David Ebner, November 8, 2007 at 10:55 AM EDT

Update at 12:08 ET: The below was written earlier Thursday morning after Fort Chip sent out a press release. My colleague Katherine O'Neill in Edmonton has been trying to get the study itself and it is not readily available. The situation seems strange. In any case, it is evolving and as one reader response to my original blog post stated, the ground north of Fort McMurray is saturated with hydrocarbons. Also, another professional contact has previously told me that the impact of the pulp and paper industry in the North cannot be overlooked. All in, it is an important debate to have, one that is not nearly prominent enough in Alberta.

The water and fish around the village of Fort Chipewyan is not safe, according to a new study commissioned by the town’s health authority—and local groups want rapid and uncontrolled oil sands development halted.

Sitting on the shores of Lake Athabasca, about 300 kilometers downstream from the oil sands mines in northern Alberta, Fort Chip is the oldest European settlement in Alberta (founded in the late 18th century and was once Canada’s richest fur-trading post). The remote place is home to about 1,000 people, mostly aboriginal. There is no year-round access by road.

The study of the water and aquatic life was conducted by ecologist and statistician Kevin Timoney and concluded that the contaminants arsenic, mercury, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are higher than they should be for safe consumption, particularly in the fish eaten by local residents.

Data from 1970 onwards was analyzed and the trend in recent years is worsening. These results appear to complement what Dr. John O’Connor previously recorded relatively anecdotally. Dr. O’Connor, a family physician who practiced in the region from 1993 until this year, was disturbed by unusually high rates of cancers in Fort Chip that are linked to arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. He spoke out about it and was hit by a backlash, including an assertion from the Alberta provincial government that everything was fine.

So the bad water is not shocking news. However, these new results, first nations argue, are undeniable—and called Thursday morning on the Alberta government to act decisively.

For the booming oil sands business, this quiet, simmering conflagration could soon be a raging fire of anger, protest and controversy.

“Government and industry cannot contest these results any more because it is proven science according to their western standards. What more proof do you need?” George Poitras, a member of the Mikisew Cree, said in a statement.

The Mikisew Cree previously called for a moratorium on oil sands development in hearings before the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board—a regulator that in four months late last year and early this year approved three giant new oil sands mining projects as being in the “public interest.” The projects had also been opposed by the Fort McMurray regional government, which said local infrastructure--schools, hospitals, roads—simply could not handle such an expansion.

 “The federal and provincial governments are continuing to issue approvals for projects despite all of the uncertainties with the true environmental effects of oil sands development,” Councilor Russell Kaskamin of the Mikisew Cree First Nation said in a statement. “This analysis suggests that we can no longer continue to exercise our rights to harvest foods due to the uncertainty of potential health risks.”

  1. Right Said Ed from Calgary, Canada writes: In 1787 Sir Alexander MacKenzie wrote the following while standing on the bank of the Clearwater River which feeds into the Athabasca in Fort McMurray "About 24 miles from the fork are some bituminous fountains, into which a pole of twenty feet long may be insterted without the least resistance. The bitumen is in a fluid state, and when mixed with gum or the resinous substance collected from the spruce fir it serves to gum the canoes..." Of course there are hydrocarbons in the water, there is miles and miles of natural oil seeps into the Athabasca River, I have stood there personally and photographed them, you can see the oil slicks coming off the natural seeps into the river on hot days tens of miles from any operations, this has been the case for thousands of years....
  2. Rick Drysdale from Canada writes: Right Said Ed
    Yes I have seen the oil leaking out myself.

    Its just a case of some well meaning or not so well meaning people who have no sense of what has happened over the past mellinia coming along and playing a blame game.

    I don't know what the hope to accomplish but you can bet it involves money moving from the oil companies to someone else.
  3. tiberius kirk from Vancouver, Canada writes: At Suncor's Millenium coker there is a huge pile of coke located not more than a few hundred yards from the river. When the wind blows, coke dust flies towards the river and the forest on the opposite bank. You can see deer and moose grazing on the coke tainted grasses. Suncor's own whmis sheets state that the coke is a possible human carcinogen. The size of the coke pile is probably in the hundreds of thousands of tons.
  4. Shamus M from Canada writes: Strange that the Globe and Mail frames this issue as a question, whereas other media sources such as the Canadian Press, the New York Times and the Edmonton Sun focus on the fact that carcinogens have definitevely been identified in the water that runs downstream from the oilsands project.

    To be accurate the study that identified the existence of the carcinogens does not make an explicit link to the oilsands, it is however telling that your paper focused on this as if it were a very ambiguous situation when in reality it's perfectly reasonable to suspect the carcinogens originate with the industrial activities upstream.
  5. Sherry Adams from Toronto, Canada writes: Yes the oil sands is an environmental catastrophe! It will also take more oil to convert the oily sands to useable oil anyway than is even in the oil sands. It is a desperate grab and last ditch effort by those old minds who have always profited by this kind of business. Is anyone surprised that this is the case. I hope not. What can be done to stop it, I don't know...
  6. Gavin Stairs from London, writes: I remember working the Suncor plant when I was just out of engineering school, back a few decades. I returned to the area around 2000 on a canoe trip from Ft. McMurray to Fitzgerald. It was spring and the water was high. I remember looking up from the river to the huge sludge pond behind a coffer dam not a few metres from the river bank, wondering what would happen if it ever gave way, and how much stuff leaches out of it into the river. Of course you can smell the plant and hear the scare guns going off for miles down the river. Those guns are to prevent wildfowl from landing on the water covered sludge ponds. I was never in doubt that the oil sands projects were an environmental disaster. It is true that there are natural seeps all around there, and many on the banks of the river. But in pollution, it is always a question of rate: how much in a given time. There is no doubt that industrial activity on the scale of the oil sands projects has increased the rate of environmental release many fold. I recall the mercury poisoning in the English River system back a few decades. Again, there was probably always mercury in the water, but not enough to be a threat to health until industrial paper making and mining increased the rate of release by orders of magnitude. This is true not only where it results in immediate, easily measurable health problems, but also generally. Around the world, heavy metals are at increased levels. Polycyclic hydrocarbons, pesticide residues, dioxins, halogenated hydrocarbons, antibiotics, pseudo-estrogins and other industrial residues are detectable everywhere, and most of these do not naturally occur in nature at detectable levels. There is no doubt that we are polluting our water, air, soils and food stocks. The only question is if and when we will stop. The costs, human, ecological and economic, will only go up over time. It is time to put ecology back into economics.
  7. Craig C from Vancouver, Canada writes: Natural seeps are natural.
    Big piles of toxic waste are not natural they are man made. Please don't compare the two.

    Oil was meant to stay in the ground. Just because we are dependent on it today doesn't mean we have to stay that way. The only reason someone would appose closing these oil sands project is because they have a vested interest in it. Meaning they work for big oil in some way shape or form.
  8. Chuck the Canuk from way out east, Canada writes: Oil Sands pollute water?? LOL. And this is news to anyone? The tar sands projects are a giant pollution/poison pill just waiting to explode in our faces. But why bother to complain. You will just get the same crap from spin doctors and lawyers from the oil industry and government. Kinda like the spin we got for decades from the doctors and lawyers and government officials on cigarette smoking and cancer. It is called greed my friends. The very same people who control the projects, the rules, and the money, are the very same people who make billions from the projects. Put the wolf in charge of the hen house, eh?. Read the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, by Joel Bakan. Read it or rent the documentary movie and it will scare the pants off you, and you will never look at big business the same, or trust another press release from the corporate spin doctors.
  9. Sanjay Singh from Waterloo, Canada writes:
    Chuck the Canuck has basically said everything that needs to be said.

    Maybe now the Alberta people will realize that money and profits are not everything.

    But the idea of the oil sands polluting the water? Well duh...
  10. We are Spirits in the Material World from Kamloops, Canada writes: Gavin Stairs has made it very clear.
    Many of todays environmentalists are those who have already 'got theirs' and only now are calling for action against the very industries that have afforded them the luxury to hold such opinions.
    "The Developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods. The Environmentalist is someone who already has a house in the woods."
  11. Alberta Dennis Notso,redneck from Canada writes: Listen to the screamers, the first major oil fields in Alberta were called the Turner Valley fields. They used the natural gas to lift the oil then burned it in open flares. Billions of cubic feet high in sulphur. there were hundreds of oil storage tanks usually two for each well plus many large tanks at the terminals. They all accumulated sludge from settlement and had to be cleanedone or two times a year. that was mostly dumped and in some cases burned. The people living there were all exposed to extremely high amounts of air polution plus the ground water was contaminated. the kids that walked to high school had to cross the river on a foot bridge at the Royolite Oil refinery. at times the sulpher smoke from the plant was so strong one choked all the way across. That field started operations about 1927 and is still producing today. Of course the polution has stopped with new regulations, however I would challange anyone to come up with any meaningful environmental damage in The Turner Valley area today. Nature has a way of healing .
  12. Alberta Dennis Notso,redneck from Canada writes: With reference to oil seepage into the Athabasca River at McMurray. Over the years there has been hundreds of thousands of bbl's of heavy oil seep into the river system and it will continue for ever. The natives in Fort Chip plus all the trappers that lived along the river since time began have been eating contaminated fish. So whats new. All of the oil sands plants are designed not to dump process water, also for those that mentioned the large tailings pond right on the river bank at Suncor. They probably did not notice all seepage water from the dam is collected and pumped back into the pond. Also note surface runoff from exposed oil sands is collected and pumped into the recycle water ponds. The only people that have a real gripe are the residents of Fort McKay. At times they have to breath some very bad air from the Syncrude plant. As a rule most industrial plants are under strict air polution regulations, however they all depend on air dilution to dilute the gas coming off the operationg plants. Which is not much different that your large heating systems in all cities.
  13. Right Said Ed from Calgary, Canada writes: Interestingly in another article on this same issue they phoned AENV for comment and it turns out than when they further investigated the elevated samples it was downstream of a large slump of the natural bank which was .... wait for it...... OIL SAND
  14. Vince Stenseth from Cochrane, AB, writes: I'm rather incredulous that it took this long for this story to become headline worthy. Dr. David Schindler at the UofA has had info about the oil companies ruining the watershed in the Athabasca for quite some time. The head in the tar-sands ostriches in the provincial legislature are very aware of what is going on and allowing the oil companies to submit bogus environmental impact statements so that the cash will keep flowing in. This pathetically near-sighted practice is throwing away the province's most important resource (fresh water) for short term gain. As desertification causes a problem in the warmer states south of the border, that water is going to be worth every cent as much as the oil is now. Not to mention the fact that as the glaciers in the Rockies melt, Southern Alberta's water supply is becoming increasingly finite. It's a shame that we have the same kind of greedy, ignorant peons in Edmonton that seem to proliferate in Washington, DC that allow the oil companies to ruin a life or death resource.
  15. Right Said Ed from Calgary, Canada writes: Vince,

    Did you know that the water use alottment in the Athabasca river is actually one of the lowest in the entire province? The worst is the battle River which actually has over 100% of it's annual flow accounted for if everyone was to use their share. If you look at the Water for life strategy of the alberta government you will see that the northern region (including the athabasca basin) is actually the least strained watershed around. Schindler would be more useful studying the southern irrigation districts and such, bu tthen he would see a lot less media attention....
  16. William Enge from Toronto, Canada writes: Gee the Alberta government signed off on Hurricane Mitch, and the spanish flu epidemic, just as long as there is a but of money in it for them!

    In fact they are just spouting the party line about the native peoples in this country, the conservatives are still trying to kill them off so they can take the rest of their land!

    Don't believe me? Read up on it, or bury your head in the oil sands like the rest of them.
  17. David Woods from Red Deer, Canada writes: Some excellent posts here. Mostly accurate facts, except the one that stated more energy was required to extract oilsands than it yields ...the actual ratio is one unit in and eight out....and improving.

    There is no doubt that the scale of mining and extraction of oilsands is going to have an impact on the environment. With the profitability of this industry , however , it can afford a massive effort to improve its environmental performance.

    And another encouraging fact is that only a small percentage of recognized reserves are mineable, most are going to be thermally extracted. This recovery has a smaller footprint, (much smaller). And don't underestimate the ability of technology to improve the impacts over time....
  18. da kretch from toronto, Canada writes: and what about the outhouses, what do they produce
  19. da kretch from toronto, Canada writes: is there any energy used to, grow wheat, corn , lettuce, raise chickens , mine that essential to life mineral, gold. why the bitching about the oil sands, its about the only land reclamation project that makes money.
  20. gran2006 skipper from Hamilton, Canada writes: I think the contaminants have more to do with the chemicals used in the process than just the oil itself. Also, I believe there is a possibility that the contamination is from a uranium mine further upstream, again from the processing not the uranium itself.

    The people in Fort Chip do remember a time when the fish did not have tumours.

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