Suncor Celebrates Tar Sands Wetland Reclamation Project a Bit Early

Suncor is celebrating their new wetland reclamation project in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, north of Fort McMurray, Alberta. Dubbed Nikanotee, the Cree word for future, the fen represents a leap forward in cleaning up the multiple environmental scars that are the byproducts of tar sands extraction, or so the oil giant’s congratulatory press release claims. But are they celebrating too soon?

Planning for the fen on a site that was once an open pit mine began approximately eight years ago and has included collaboration with the Universities of Waterloo, Calgary and Colorado State. Construction of the fen’s underlying watershed was completed in January 2013 in time for planting in the spring.

On August 25 Suncor held an official opening ceremony that included the planting of sedge and speeches from Mark Little, Suncor’s vice president of oilsands and in situ operations, as well as Wood Buffalo mayor Melissa Blake and Fort McMurray Metis president Richard Dragon.

“Less than 500 metres away, truck engines roar and smokestacks billow as Canada’s largest oil company continues to dig bitumen out of the ground,” wrote Vincent McDermott of Fort McMurray Today.

An areal shot of oil sands mining in Northern Alberta illustrates the challenges of reclamation

Jennifer Grant, Director of Oil Sands at the Pembina Institute points out that peat bogs, or muskeg as the regions are often known, are vital ecological features for a number of reasons. They provide natural habitat to a “disproportionately large diversity of wildlife.” Caribou are particularly reliant on the areas and are currently threatened in Northwestern Alberta, largely due to the continued shrinkage of that habitat.

That diversity makes the land particularly important to local First Nations communities. As the land has been progressively taken up by open-pit bitumen mining, local communities have had to make changes to their traditional land use, causing a ripple effect of social issues.

Alberta’s wetlands also act as a filtration system for the water table and a carbon sink for the atmosphere. They additionally moderate storm and melt water run-off, leading some to suggest that their damage may have played a part in the spring’s flooding further south.

So any effort to restore the peat bogs can only be good, right?

The trouble is that scientific evidence has shown that reclamation of these vital and delicate ecosystems presents a significant challenge and lags far behind the destruction companies like Suncor create in pursuit of tar sands bitumen. According to their own data, Suncor alone has disturbed more than 21,000 hectares of land. As of 2012 only 1542 hectares or 7.2 per cent of that had been reclaimed.

The issue with fens like the one Suncor is seeking to recreate in Wood Buffalo is that the time required to reach sufficient peat depth is counted in centuries, not years. In a 2012 paper published in the journal Ecology and Society, University of Alberta professor Lee Foote argued that even under optimal conditions,it would take 100 to 300 years to achieve the minimum of 30 cm of cover required to qualify as peatland.

Suncor shipped in peat moss to kickstart the process, but whether that is an effective strategy in such a sophisticated ecosystem remains to be seen.

Another issue is location—Suncor has actually placed the new fen in what was once a river valley. Christine Daly, Suncor’s wetlands reclamation director told Fort McMurray Today that she wasn’t worried about relocating the wetland.  

“I don’t think it has an adverse effect on the area, as long as you’re creating the same ecosystems that were here before,” she said. “If you have a forest to our left or a forest to our right, what matters is we’re creating healthy forests once again. We just have to be putting the same ecosystems back on the landscape. They don’t have to be in the exact same place.”

Tar sands tailings ponds, pictured above, cover more than 170 km² of area around Fort McMurray.

Biologists Suzanne Bayley and Rebecca C. Rooney co-authored a paper that questioned that very attitude. They believe that location can have a massive impact on whether an ecosystem will be able to survive. 

“It makes us angry because they will put some kind of plants back on the landscape, but it will not look the way it was and it will not have the same type of functions,” Bayley, who has been studying the region for nearly two decades, told the Globe and Mail last year.

Furthermore, Grant points out that reclaiming areas used in mining is not simply a matter of putting back what was removed.

“When you dig up big holes in the ground, you take away the trees and the muskeg and the overburden, and you get at that oil sand, you’re going to have a lot more materials after mining that you had before mining,” she says. “All of those layers that took centuries to settle and to form, whether it be rock or wetland, they’re now disturbed and they create a lot more volume.”

The large amounts of new material has lead to a transformation in Northern Alberta from a low-lying wetland-dominated region into a hilly region that might not support wetland ecology.

Tailing ponds, which take up a massive amount of land in the region, also pose a danger to wetlands recovery.

“Over 840 billion liters of toxic fluid byproducts are currently held in 170 km² of open reservoirs without any known process to purify this water in meaningful time frames even as some of it leaches into adjacent lands and rivers,” wrote Foote.

Regardless of these enormous hurdles to wetlands reclamation, there remains no governmental policy in place regarding wetlands reclamation in Northern Alberta. The province’s current wetland policy, set out in 1993, acknowledges the importance of wetlands, but doesn’t even mention the effects of tar sands development.

Undisturbed muskeg is a vital feature of the ecosystem, acting as a water filter and a carbon sink

So perhaps the Nikanotee Fen does represent a future for the tar sands. But without a framework in place to oversee efforts like it, what exactly that future holds remains unclear.

Image Credit: Suncor Energy via Flickr
Image Credit: The Pembina Institute via Flickr
Image Credit: Kris Krug via Flickr
Image Credit: Mark Elliot via Flickr