When it comes to the oilsands, there’s a particular gloss that accompanies industry’s presentation of in-situ extraction.

Unlike the pronounced nature of open-pit mines, with the accompanying heavy haulers and seemingly endless horizons of tailings ponds, in-situ — meaning in ground or in place — operations have a much less visible footprint.

Cenovus has gone so far as to dub these operations — which require the injection of steam underground to heat viscous oil, allowing it to be pumped to surface — “a different oil sands.”

While they certainly do represent the future of the oilsands — in-situ projects have already outpaced mining production and are set to increase by one million barrels per day by 2030 — they also come with their own set of problems.

In-situ oilsands operations are incredibly greenhouse gas-intensive — requiring copious quantities of natural gas, often obtained from fracking, to produce the steam that’s injected underground.

Operations require extensive roads and seismic lines that expose threatened caribou to an increased risk from wolves and create habitat disturbances that are connected to low reproduction and calf survival rates. These compounding impacts to caribou are part of the underlying justification of the province’s controversial wolf cull.

And the proposed use of solvents as a substitute for steam has given new rise to long-held concerns about groundwater contamination from steam-injection processes.

The cumulative impacts of in-situ operations are extensive, which is why many onlookers are scratching their heads as Ottawa allows for their exemption under new environmental assessment laws — leaving reviews entirely in the hands of the province.

“To have the country’s main environmental assessment law leave the highest-carbon projects off the list is just unacceptable to us,” Patrick DeRochie, climate and energy program manager at Environmental Defence, told The Narwhal.

“The notion that provinces are able to step in and do this is not true. It doesn’t hold water.”

New legislation keeps Harper’s project list

As The Narwhal reported in April, Canada’s proposed environmental assessment rules — designed to restore public trust in the federal process for reviewing major projects — were released without any details on what kinds of projects would trigger review under the new legislation.

Back in 2012, the Harper government radically overhauled the country’s environmental assessment processes and introduced the use of a “project list” to determine whether a project — like a dam, power plant or oilsands mine — would be subject to a federal review.

Unlike the previous regime, which relied on automatic “triggers,” the project list dramatically narrowed the activities eligible for federal assessment and accorded a great deal of discretionary power to the federal environment minister.

Thousands of projects per year were no longer reviewed by Ottawa.

Outcry ensued.

The current federal government’s solution, Bill C-69, a new and controversial impact assessment bill currently under debate in the Senate, will overhaul the 2012 legislation — but keep the project list intact.

The contents of that list remain undisclosed to the public. But from the get-go Environment Minister Catherine McKenna indicated in-situ oilsands projects would be exempt from the list.

In a statement e-mailed to The Narwhal, a spokesperson for the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency confirmed this is still the case: “At this time, the approach to draft regulations to support the Impact Assessment Act remains unchanged.”

Last week, the federal environment ministry confirmed to The Globe and Mail that in-situ projects “fall within the exemption eligibility.”

Anna Johnston, staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law, said that the case for not returning to the previous approach of “triggers” in Bill C-69 was premised on the expansion of Harper’s project list.

The exemption of in-situ operations seriously undermines that expectation, Johnston said, adding many of the impacts of these operations, including those affecting Indigenous rights, fall under federal jurisdiction.

According to Johnston, Ottawa can and should assess factors like health and safety of nearby communities and workers, the potential use of solvents and impacts on species from habitat fragmentation.

Many in-situ projects occur within the critical habitat of boreal caribou, she said, and the federal government has made it “very clear” that Alberta isn’t doing a sufficient job to protect habitat.

“Why would it then entrust the provincial government to assess in-situ for its effects on boreal caribou when Alberta has demonstrated it hasn’t been doing that job adequately?” she asked.

In-situ emissions 43 per cent higher than mining

According to a recent analysis by the Pembina Institute, in-situ extraction produced an average of 43 per cent more emissions per barrel than mining in 2016. That’s a serious concern for climate policy analysts given that all new oilsands production after roughly 2022 will come from in-situ projects.

Ambitious claims are frequently made by industry and government that per-barrel emissions will soon plummet with the implementation of new technologies.

But Pembina analyst Jan Gorski told The Narwhal that most emissions reductions have occurred in upgrading, not extraction, with little signs of improvement in mining or in-situ extraction.

Furthermore, the most promising technologies are still in early stages and will only apply to new projects, not expansions (which is where production is set to grow).

“The greater question is that it hasn’t yet been shown how oilsands emissions, even as they are today, would be compatible with our emissions targets,” Gorski said.

“You take into account that there’s going to be more growth and it just makes the problem worse.”

Recent studies have also questioned current estimates of methane leakage from extraction of natural gas, used heavily by in-situ producers. A journal article in Elementa from earlier this year indicated that emissions from operations near Red Deer may be 15 times higher than reported.

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley touring the Nexen Long Lake facility in September. The Long Lake facility is expected to produce 26,000 barrels of oil per day at full capacity. Photo: Chris Schwarz / Government of Alberta

Alberta won’t introduce emissions cap regulations before election

Complicating matters, the federal government has justified exemption of in-situ extraction from the project list because of Alberta’s 100-megatonne oilsands emissions cap.

But recently Alberta announced that, despite the fact the cap was legislated in 2016, it will delay the implementation of final regulations for the cap until after the next provincial election.

This puts the future of the cap itself in a precarious position, given the potential for a United Conservative Party victory in 2019.

The United Conservative Party is a loud and vocal opponent of both the 100-megatonne emissions cap and the idea of capitulating to the federal government’s national carbon levy.

Party leader Jason Kenney vowed to scrap Alberta’s carbon levy and fight Ottawa’s pan-Canadian climate framework, including requirements for a carbon tax. Kenney’s stance could end up pitting Alberta against the federal government, much like the current battle taking place between Saskatchewan and Ottawa.

At the heart of these federation feuds is the question of whether or not greenhouse gas emissions fall under the authority of the federal government or the provinces, said Stephen Hazell, former director of legislative and regulatory affairs at the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal will soon rule on the constitutionality of the federal government’s plan to impose a carbon tax on the province, he said.

Hazell, now director of conservation with Nature Canada, said that should the matter rise to the level of the Supreme Court of Canada, he has no doubt that a requirement to assess projects on their carbon emissions would be upheld.

“I reject the idea that greenhouse gas emissions are not a matter of federal interest and authority,” he said.

Latest oilsands mega mine proposal a reality check for Alberta’s emissions cap

Hazell said in-situ operations fit neatly within the category of major projects likely to have significant adverse environmental impacts — a trigger under former environmental assessment rules.

“Given that climate change could destroy human civilization, maybe it might be a good idea to include high-carbon projects for assessment under the new legislation,” he said.

DeRouchie of Environment Defence said that Canada has made a promise to the international community to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

“The federal government has responsibility for the entire country to meet its climate targets,” DeRouchie said.

“We’ve seen provinces failing in the past, and continuing to put in place plans that will fail in the future. There’s actually a requirement for the federal government to meet those national commitments, and that means bringing the provinces along.”

Oilsands emissions are expected to hit 115 megatonnes of annual emissions by 2030, consuming 22 per cent of Canada’s carbon budget under the Paris Agreement.

The Pembina Institute has calculated that if all currently approved oilsands projects are built, they will add up to 131 megatonnes per year.

New environmental assessment rules allow for multi-jurisdiction collaboration

Were in-situ projects to be included under federal environmental assessment rules, it would be a first, Martin Olszynski, associate professor of law at the University of Calgary and expert in environmental assessments, told The Narwhal.

In-situ operations have never been captured by the federal environment assessment regime and it would be a significant change to include such projects in the process, he said, adding he would be surprised to see such a move given the high tension between Alberta and Ottawa.

Olszynski said, however, that in-situ oilsands extraction should be subjected to rigorous environmental assessment processes, especially if conducted at the provincial level.

“Alberta claims that it has those,” he said in an interview.

“My own sense, based on my own research, is there are a lot of things that aren’t being done very well. We are reasonably decent at documenting impacts but it’d be hard to imagine that the assessment process really changes the outcome or the way we approach these projects.”

It devours our land

Some have pointed to a collaborative solution. The new federal impact assessment framework is designed for collaborations between different levels of government.

Johnston said that if the federal government joins in existing provincial assessments, it could ensure oversight while maintaining the practice of “one project, one review.”

The new legislation also allows for integration of Indigenous environmental assessment processes.

According to Johnston, exemptions undermine a strong feature of the new rules: allowing for substitutions. The new legislation provides for the option of substituting a provincial assessment for a federal one, when and where it makes sense to do so.

“If Alberta believes that its processes are that good, then it can just rely on these substitution provisions,” she said. Johnston added a benefit of having a substitution provision as opposed to an exemption is that the federal government retains decision-making authority when it comes to how an assessment will be conducted and by what agency.

Olszynski said there’s also a fair bit of malleability with the future of the project list.

Because it’s a cabinet regulation, with the legislation offering no clear criteria about what can go on or off the list, a new government can add or subtract from the list — or even scrap it entirely — with very little effort. That could be very good or very bad, depending on one’s perspective of whoever forms the next government, he said.

Johnston said that while the bill may go to committee as early as next week, actual considerations won’t commence in any way until February — meaning there’s still time for people to voice their concerns about the exemption of in-situ. (You can find your MP’s contact information on this website)

She emphasized that much of the criticism about Bill C-69 is missing the mark and undermining the potential for improvements.

“If everybody could just step back and take a deep breath and think a little bit more realistically about this bill, then maybe they’d recognize that impact assessment has a really key role to play in ensuring responsible development — and it’d actually be beneficial to have more projects subject to it because it’s almost never used to stop projects but to design projects more responsibly,” she said.

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In 2015, a pipeline was designed to cut through a sensitive wetland in B.C. The professional biologist reviewing the project told his company that there could be significant damage to the wetland and an extensive monitoring program would have to be set up to watch for effects.

The larger consultancy the biologist’s company worked for refused to submit the report to the pipeline company.

“They took it and rewrote it, basically,” he told DeSmog Canada. “It wasn’t my document anymore.”

The biologist, who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, said he engaged in a protracted battle with the consultancy, with little effect.

Eventually the B.C. provincial environmental assessment office stepped in and recommended the same monitoring system he originally suggested.

That fight to alter the environmental impacts documented in a scientific report is just one example of the ways professional biologists, engineers, geoscientists and others across the country face pressure from a system with few legislated requirements for scientific rigour.

In interviews with several current and former consultants, the notion was raised again and again that strict rules for scientific integrity could provide a backstop for professionals who are being pressured to alter their recommendations to benefit a project.

That could be about to change, as the federal government introduces a new Impact Assessment Act to replace Canada’s controversial and much-maligned Environmental Assessment Act.

A large majority of Canadians want the new Act to include stricter rules around the inclusion of science, according to a new study released Monday in the journal Facets.

Looking at the comments from public, industry and government solicited by an expert review panel, researchers found the public overwhelmingly asked for more rigorous and transparent scientific analysis of projects during an environmental review.

“In the online questionnaire, people had to rank their top three concerns; science comes out way up there,” said Aerin Jacob, an author of the new study.

The sample of opinions — being drawn from written submissions to the standing committee — is admittedly self-selecting, leaving the paper open to criticisms of selection bias.

“These are people who care enough to be involved, whatever their views are,” Jacob concedes. But other surveys conducted in more traditional ways have returned similar results.

Coauthor Jonathan Moore says what makes the survey unique is that it’s a way of looking at what people are telling the government — thus allowing people to evaluate what the government actually does with that information.

For example, while industry, scientists and the public were aligned on some issues, such as transparency in the government’s decision making, one major area in which industry opinions differed from those of scientists and the public was how rigorous science should be in environmental assessments.

“I think what that means is that the degree to which the government tackled that or not will reveal the degree to which environmental assessment is created for industry or created for the rest of Canada,” Moore said.

Science often not made public

While language in Environment Minister Catherine McKenna’s mandate letter instructs her to “ensure that decisions are based on science, facts, and evidence, and serve the public’s interest,” there is no formal requirement for evidence to be made public before decisions are made.

The new study broke down that concept of evidence-based decision making in environmental assessments into five categories: openly sharing information, evaluating cumulative effects, scientific rigour, transparency in decision-making and independence between regulators and proponents.

“These results not only show there’s strong support across multiple sectors, they also give a road map of how to do it,” says Jacob.

“Rather than just saying you should use science or you should do evidence-based decision making — what does that actually mean? — here, we’re showing, here are five fundamental components of having a scientific approach to environmental assessments, and truly follow up on that commitment.”

Currently, the federal cabinet has a high degree of discretion once assessments have been presented to the government, and the factors that were or were not considered are not made public.

Increased transparency was one of the categories on which almost everyone agreed. For industry, it could mean saving time on environmental assessments, by knowing what was coming ahead of time. For the public, it could mean being able to hold politicians accountable for not taking into consideration promises they had made, or priorities they had professed to have.

Just three submissions were opposed to increased transparency in decision-making, compared to more than 150 in favour.

That’s reflected in the recommendations made by the expert panel: that “information be easily accessible, and permanently and publicly available.”

While the proposed new Act uses the word “transparent” several times, it does not require that data be made public by default, just that there be instructions on how the information can be obtained.

“That kind of redirection is not useful,” says Martin Olszynski, a lawyer at the University of Calgary Faculty of Law.

“You know that the agency has an internal file that contains all of that information, and we basically just say, all of that information should be on the public registry.”

“What if there’s a little bit of harm on my project, and there’s a little bit of harm on somebody else’s project, which is right downstream…Who’s looking at the big picture?” https://t.co/iyVNkwLqJy

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 7, 2018

No interconnected knowledge

That lack of transparency also means there are limited opportunities to consider cumulative impacts.

Commenters from the public and even many in industry also asked for more consideration of cumulative effects. Whether through greenhouse gas emissions, air or water quality degradation or wildlife habitat destruction, Jacob said the piling up of effects from different projects is what pushes consequences past a point of no return.

“No one project is going to do that. But together, they do,” she says.

A second professional biologist who spoke to DeSmog Canada on the condition of anonymity said cumulative impacts are among the most insidious, because without specific laws around watching for them, it’s easy to feel pressured to overlook how one project’s impacts stack on those of another nearby.

“What if there’s a little bit of harm on my project, and there’s a little bit of harm on somebody else’s project, which is right downstream…Who’s looking at the big picture?” she asked.

That gap in legislation means that industry-hired professionals have little in the way of recourse when asked to make determinations that they might otherwise feel uncomfortable making. British Columbia is currently conducting a review of the system through which paid consultants are relied upon by the province in environmental decision making (known as professional reliance). The province is also reviewing its environmental assessment process with an eye toward cumulative impacts.

Pressure on professionals

In December of 1980, David Mayhood sent in a report evaluating damage CN Rail had done to a forest in Jasper National Park. It had diverted a stream into the forest to protect its railbed. He found the stream had become impassable for fish because of logjams, while 10 hectares of forest had been wiped out.

“I was fairly graphic in the description about the damage that had been done there,” he said. But there was little appetite for graphic descriptions at the consultancy that had hired him.

“When I got the final copy of the report back with our section in it, it had been drastically changed,” he said. “Where I said an area had been devastated, they said it had been ‘altered.’ ”

Mayhood wrote a letter of protest, but the report was submitted.

He says that kind of pressure to water down language, and consequently undermine the science behind it, has persisted throughout his career.

“The fundamental issue is that biologists…should be independent,” he says. “They aren’t. They’re objectively not independent; they work for a government that has a political agenda, and private industry that also has its own agenda.”

Alana Westwood, science and policy analyst with Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, experienced that lack of independence as she began her career as a junior biologist at a consulting firm. She said that although most experiences met the standard of science, there was one particular firm that went far outside what could be considered objective science.

The consulting company was dominated by one client, an electrical generation company, which held an inordinate amount of power over the quality of science Westwood and her colleagues could do.

“I was routinely asked to do things I had no experience for or training in,” she said. For example, she was asked to conduct a bird survey in what she now knows is the off-season for the birds she was ostensibly looking for, using methods she now knows would never be effective.

And it got worse, when she was asked to do a literature review of the known effects of a particular monitoring technique the firm’s sole client wanted to use.

“Then my boss came to me, and said, of the 20 or so papers you found, how many found no effect, or found it didn’t harm them?” she recalls. There were four papers among the 20.

Her boss was clear on what needed to be done, in order to please the client upon which the entire business turned — like so many biologists before and after her, she would be asked to compromise her training, ethics and better judgment to make life easier for a client whose priority was delivering value to shareholders, rather that protecting the environment.

“Use only those four,” Westwood recalls being told.

As the interview comes to a close, co-author Jonathan Moore loops the conversation around to hockey. In recent years, the NHL — concerned that team doctors were facing conflicts of interest as they assessed players for concussions — decided to change their system.

Today, that assessment is done by outside doctors who wouldn’t face pressure to put unfit players back on the ice.

Moore sees the same possibility for environmental assessment reform to take the pressure away from professionals to deliver what their clients want.

“I find that if Canada can do it for hockey, I would hope they could do it for making these huge decisions that affect the environment and people that rely on the environment.”

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