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Transforming the Northern Landscape
About 40 percent of the area is wetlands, some of which have been drained and rivers diverted to prevent flooding of the mine sites. One of the world's most spectacular wetlands is found here, and despite its recognised ecological importance, is now slated to be strip mined. The McClelland Lake Wetland Complex is about 120 kms north of the oil sands boom town of Fort McMurray Alberta. The complex is comprised of McClelland Lake, 12 sinkholes, and a remarkably beautiful and intricate, ancient patterned fen. The complex is home to numerous rare plants, including five insect-eating species. Scientists like Richard Thomas consider the fen to be a world-class natural heritage site. "McClelland Fen will serve as the lightning rod that focuses world attention on the ecological holocaust now taking place in the SMA (Surface Mineable Area) of northeast Alberta," said Thomas, a boreal ecologist working for the Alberta Wilderness Association (AWA), in a statement. Because of its ecological importance, the region had been off-limits to mining until an oil company successfully lobbied top Alberta politicians in the late 1990s, says Ian Urquhart, a political scientist at the University of Alberta and spokesperson for the AWA, an environmental group. Now 40 percent of the fen and 50 percent of the entire complex will be destroyed by mining. A mere 0.1 percent (4.13 sq km) of the 3,450-square-kilometre oil sands in what is called the Fort Hills Surface Mineable Area will be protected. "We're trying to secure protection for a 200 sq km area that includes the complex and surrounding lands as a buffer -- not very much considering the size of the SMA," Urquhart told IPS. However, conservation and environmental preservation is the furthest thing from government officials' minds. Late last fall, the Alberta government set off a public firestorm when released its "Mineable Oil Sands Strategy" (MOSS) document. It effectively declared that thousands of square kilometres of boreal forest and wetlands with oil sands underneath were only good for one thing: extracting oil. "For the first time, the government openly said they were writing off more than 3,000 sq km for oil," said Urquhart, who is writing a book on the oil sands. That had been the unstated but de facto government policy since the first oil sands were mined in the late 1960s, he said. Growing unease about the speed, scale and impacts of oil sands development led to widespread public protest over the MOSS document. Now a one-year review of the strategy involving industry, the public and NGOs has begun. Oil companies have spent millions of dollars reclaiming mined lands by planting grasses and trees, says Greg Stringham, vice president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. "Twenty percent of the land mined by Syncrude and Suncor (two of the largest oil sands companies) has been reclaimed," Stringham said. But although trees are now growing on about 5,000 hectares of land mined up to 40 years ago, no ecologist would call these lands restored as boreal forest, said Urquhart. "It's impossible to recreate the boreal ecosystem," he said. Companies do not have to even make the attempt to restore the boreal forest. All they need do is fix things up so that the land could be used for other purposes in the future. Despite that low bar, not one hectare has yet to be officially reclaimed, according to the government of Alberta. It will take 300 or more years before reclaimed areas become functioning forest again, says Rick Schneider of the Canadian Parks and Wildness Society in Edmonton. The wetlands may never return. One report estimates that nearly 10 percent of the region's wetlands will be permanently removed from the landscape, even after reclamation efforts. Despite Alberta's huge size of 661,848 sq km, inhabited by just 3.3 million people, industrial logging and oil and gas development have reduced its vast forests to less than 40 percent of their original extent, according to a recent study by Global Forest Watch Canada. The rate and extent of forest loss has been comparable to the losses in the Amazon rainforest, the group says. Its study found that much of the remaining forest is heavily fragmented by industrial activities, which has had a significant impact on woodland caribou and grizzly bears. Most of the woodland caribou herds are in decline or threatened with total extermination, including those in Athabasca oil sands region. Caribou and grizzly bears, along with lynx, martin and some forest birds, are particularly sensitive to human disturbance, said Schneider. "No one has quantified the impacts of industrial development on these species until now," he said. Such studies have come late and are more about how to adapt mining techniques to minimise the damage on species rather whether such activities should be done in some areas at all, said Urquhart. And it will be difficult for science to keep up. "The pace of oil sands development is absolutely frenetic," he said. *This article is the second of a four-part series on the environmental impacts of Canada's massive oil sands mining and processing development, the world's largest industrial project. Mega-Project Scrapes the Bottom of the Oil Barrel Thousands of square kilometres of tar-laden soil and sand underlying Canada's boreal forests are being gobbled up to feed an insatiable appetite for oil in the U.S. and elsewhere. It is an industrial effort of Leviathan proportions that is growing at a breakneck, greed-fuelled pace. The environmental impacts are on a similar scale. The world's largest or third-largest dam, depending on who you talk to, holds back 300 million cubic metres of contaminated water and sand. In all, mine wastes cover something like 50 square kilometres -- easily visible from space. Squeezing oil from tar sands 200 feet below northern Alberta's seemingly endless carpet of spruce and fir trees, pristine lakes and wetlands is not only expensive, it is messy and highly polluting. "Oil from the tar sands has by far the biggest environmental impacts compared to any other method of oil production," said Dan Woynillowicz, a researcher at the Pembina Institute, a Calgary, Alberta environmental group. "Few people are aware of the scale of the oil sands development," Woynillowicz told IPS. Tar sands are contained in three major areas beneath 140,800 square kilometres of north-eastern Alberta -- an area larger than the U.S. state of Florida. Since 1973, only about two percent of this total has been involved in oil production, according to Alberta government data. The U.S. Department of Energy says this enormous area represents the world's second largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Shell Oil claim Canada's reserves are in fact the largest in the world. Canada has also quietly become the largest supplier of imported oil to the U.S. More 2.1 million barrels of black gold go south every day of the year, supplying about 10 percent of the total U.S. oil and gasoline consumption. Half of that amount comes from the Alberta tar sands, which are also called oil sands. The oil sands development is already the world's largest industrial project. And with sky-high energy prices, oil companies from around the world plan to invest as much as 110 billion dollars to expand operations, hoping to triple oil production over the next 10 to 15 years. Even more pipelines will soon criss-cross Alberta to export all that black gold. Last week, a Canadian company proposed to build a 3.6-billion-dollar, 3,300- kilometre-long pipeline to Texas so that 400,000 barrels of oil sands crude a day could be refined into gasoline by 2011. China has proposed a 2.5-billion-dollar, 1,160-kilometre pipeline to move oil from Alberta through the Rocky Mountains to the west coast of Canada. There are eight or nine proposals on the table including pipelines to California, says Greg Stringham, vice president of Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. Some have already started an expansion of pipelines into the U.S. Midwest and to Canada's west coast, Stringham told IPS. "There is nowhere else in the world where this much money is being invested," said Woynillowicz. So far, strip mining has been the main technique for getting at the tar-laden sands. The world's largest hydraulic excavators scoop up 80 to 90 tonnes of rock and sand and dump it into the world's largest dump trucks, the Caterpillar 797B. A 796B stands 7.6 metres and weighs 623,690 kgs when it's empty. One oil company, Canadian Natural Resources, recently purchased 23 of these at a cost of 234.7 million dollars. Many operations also use huge conveyor belt systems to transport the material to processing plants, where the tar is literally boiled out of the sand with hot water heated to 95 degrees C. About 90 percent of the tar is recovered. The tar or bitumen has to be further processed by adding hydrogen, extreme heat -- up to 500 degrees C -- and pressure and removing nitrogen and sulfur before it becomes what's known as light sweet synthetic crude oil. "It's scraping the bottom of the oil barrel to get oil from the tar sands," said Woynillowicz. Not only does the mining destroy large areas of land, the process is very energy- and water-intensive and emits enormous volumes of greenhouse gases. It also produces huge volumes of waste. Roughly two tonnes of sand must be excavated and processed to make one barrel or 158 litres of oil. For every thousand litres of oil shipped south, 6,000 litres of tailings are left behind. Syncrude, the biggest tar sands operator and a joint venture among eight U.S. and Canadian energy companies, has 300 million cubic metres of tailings penned up at its Southwest Sand Storage Facility. Even more liquids are stored in the 22 square kilometre Mildred Lake Tailings Settling Basin. "It's a major bird breeding area so noise cannons and scarecrows have to be used to keep them away," says Rick Schneider of the Canadian Parks and Wildness Society in Edmonton Alberta. Stringham says the oil companies are working on new techniques to both use less water and to remediate the tailings. However, experts at Canada's National Energy Board called the challenge of reclaiming tailings "daunting" in 2004 since there is no known technique. By 2020 just two companies will produce more than one billion cubic metres of fine tailings, according to the Pembina report "Oil Sands Fever." "The environmental impacts of the oil sands are astronomical," said Lindsay Telfer of the Sierra Club of Canada from Edmonton, Alberta. Greenhouse gas emissions, forest and wetland destruction and fragmentation, air pollution, toxic waste, water pollution, human health and social impacts, it's all here in Alberta's oil sands, Telfer said in an interview. Even former U.S. vice president Al Gore has made the oil sands an issue, decrying the enormous use of natural gas to produce the world's dirtiest oil. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in June, Gore said that using Alberta's tar sands to supply the U.S. with oil was "truly nuts" because of the environmental impacts. "This is the biggest environmental issue in Canada," agrees Telfer. |
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Over much of northern Canada, there is little more than trees, rocks, lakes and wetlands. But in northeastern Alberta, the landscape is changing dramatically as strip mining peels off the forest and soil to reach a molasses-like viscous oil mixed with sand and clay 40 to 60 metres below the surface.