As production in Alberta's oilsands continues to expand, waste byproducts continue to build up as well, from petcoke piles to tailing ponds. Now the energy companies behind the oilsands boom are planning to dump their growing volumes of toxic wastewater into man-made lakes, in the hope that they eventually become natural habitats.

Jeremy van Loon of Business Week writes that Syncrude Canada, Royal Dutch Shell, and ExxonMobil affiliate Imperial Oil "are running out of room to store the contaminated water that is a byproduct of the process used to turn bitumen–a highly viscous form of petroleum–into diesel and other fuels."

By 2022 the monthly output of wastewater from these companies "could turn New York's Central Park into a toxic reservoir 11 feet deep, according to the Pembina Institute," writes van Loon.

To accommodate the growing volume of byproduct, the energy companies have reportedly "obtained permission from provincial authorities to flood abandoned tar sand mines with a mix of tailings and fresh water." According to van Loon, this would "transform northern Alberta into the largest man-made lake district on earth."

Syncrude's Base Mine Lake, on which work began last summer, will measure 2,000 acres when complete, and is expected by the company to "eventually replicate a natural habitat, complete with fish and waterfowl."

Non-profit environmental group Pembina describes these end pit lakes as "high-risk and experimental," noting that "historical data about using end pit lakes as toxic waste dumps are insufficient to determine whether or not they are a safe, long-term tool for reclaiming tailings waste as no example of a functional end pit lake currently exists."

There are about 30 end pit lakes planned for the Athabasca Boreal region, according to Alberta's Cumulative Environment Management Association.

"There's no way to tell how the ecology of these lakes will evolve over time," said Jennifer Grant, director of oilsands at Pembina. "It's all guesswork at this point. It's reckless."

"We're playing Russian roulette with a big part of an important ecosystem," said David Schindler, an ecology professor at the University of Alberta. "Nothing is going to grow in that soup of toxic elements except perhaps a few hydrosulfide bacteria. And all of the unforeseen events are being downplayed."

Syncrude began creating an end pit lake 30 miles north of Fort McMurray this summer, filling in a mine with fresh water from a dam to a depth of 16 feet to keep toxic tailings down at the bottom. According to company spokeswoman Cheryl Robb, trials involving "test ponds" resulted in naturally occurring ecosystems, with microbes helping to break down pollutants.

However, van Loon writes that the "largest test pond was 4 hectares–roughly 1/200th the size of Syncrude's lake."

"The big question we have is how long will it take before the water is clean, how long is it going to take before the littoral zones develop and the shoreline vegetation builds up?" said Robb. "But we're confident in the technology."

One of the major concerns surrounding end pit lakes is the possibility of contaminated water seeping into the boreal ecosystem. In October, "communities bordering Canada's Athabasca River were cautioned not to drink from the waterway after a breach in a coal tailings storage pond dumped 1 billion liters (264 million gallons) of contaminated water into an area west of Edmonton."

According to Pembina, the exact amount of seepage from tailings in Alberta is "either not known or has not been made public," but modelled estimates suggest that "11 to 12.6 million litres of tailings leak from tailings ponds each day."

Image Credit: WhitneyH / Flickr

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The federal government has repeatedly decided to forego prosecution for oil, gas and pipeline industry violations, according to Environment Canada documents released to Postmedia News through Access to Information legislation.

According to the documents the federal government issued 'warning letters' to companies like Devon Canada, a tar sands oil producer, and Gibson Energy, a midstream pipeline operator, after two separate oil spills proved the companies' respective facilities were in violation of the federal Fisheries Act. Violations of this sort can attract fines of up to $1 million, or three years imprisonment, the letters warned.

According to Postmedia's Mike De Souza, letters of this kind were sent to several companies in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec for various offenses including the pollution of air and water as well as inadequate emergency preparedness and shoddy record keeping.

Environment Canada indicated warning letters are effective in gaining industry's attention. Prosecutions, on the other hand, are both expensive and time consuming. Yet, the released documents suggest that when it comes to monitoring and enforcement of industry's actions, the government may not be acting in the public's interest.

"Our goal isn't to prosecute for the sake of prosecuting (or) make the numbers look good in that sense," Heather McCready, a manager from the ministry's enforcement branch, told Postmedia. "Our goal is to bring people into compliance as quickly as possible."

"It's about protecting the environment. It's not about racking up points. So a warning letter can be a very effective tool to do that."

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), Canada's largest oil and gas lobby group, suggested the provincial and federal governments use a "compliance oriented approach" of enforcement to minimize risk.

However, Parliament's environment watchdog, Scott Vaughan the federal Commissioner on Environment and Sustainable Development, released an audit of Environment Canada in 2011, claiming the department's enforcement program is "not well managed to adequately enforce compliance with the Canadian Environmental Protection Act."

The conclusion of Vaughan's report stated Environment Canada did "not have adequate information on whom it is regulating and who is not complying" with the Act and that in many cases there was "no evidence that the Directorate had applied key management controls intended to ensure that enforcement officers carry out their enforcement activities…or that enforcement officers followed up on their enforcement actions to verify whether violators returned to compliance."

Environment Canada, the report held, was not in any position to know if its methods had improved compliance or minimized risk to Canadians and the environment, because the department simply wasn't monitoring its own activities, adequately training its employees or engaging in enforcement planning and targeting.

Vaughan told Postmedia: "Warning letters can work. There's absolutely no doubt (about that)." Adding, that one would "need to go back and figure out if the problem has been fixed."

Environment Canada's capacity to do so has been increasingly diminished after a series of funding cuts – millions of dollars worth – have rid the ministry of enforcement officers trained to test pollution and gauge the nature of an offense according to existing public health and safety standards.

Existing environmental legislation also took a significant hit last year with the passage of Omnibus Budget Bill C-38 which significantly reduced federal oversight of industrial projects while speeding up the process of their approval.

According to De Souza, Environment Canada officials "initially declined to answer questions about the nature of its warning letters in July 2012, prompting Postmedia News to make multiple requests for the records related to the oil and gas industry using federal access to information legislation…Environment Canada took about five months to process the access to information requests and release its warning letters."

Environment Canada also rejected the findings of Vaughan's audit, claiming the Department "disagrees with the audit's contention that the issues indentified prevent the Department from planning its enforcement activities to effectively target the highest risks to human health and the environment." Based on this contention Environment Canada wrote, "the Department does not accept the enforcement audit findings or conclusions."

Yet Vaughan maintains Environment Canada lacks the resources to monitor and enforce environmental regulations. According to Postmedia, "Vaughan concluded that inspectors needed special training to enforce 30 existing regulations on toxic substances but did not have this training for 16 of the listed substances and were lacking some critical laboratory facilities required to do their jobs."

As Vaughan stated, "there are some big gaps…Putting more money into something in itself doesn't necessarily make it fixed. So we said you have some pretty big gaps and you need to fix those gaps."

"There are some nasty stuff that these regulations (are intended to control) – asbestos, dioxins and furans – things that have been listed as toxic," Vaughan said. "They harm human health, they potentially cause cancer and so the regulations are there. Having a regulation on paper only goes so far and you need inspectors and you need a system to go in to make sure they have the full force of the law."

As the recently released documents demonstrate, however, Environment Canada's regulation remains largely on paper, where issued warnings take the place of strengthened monitoring, enforcement and, crucially, prosecution of polluters.

Vaughan recently announced his decision to resign from his position as Commissioner on Environment and Sustainable Development, two years before the end of his term. Vaughan has been treated with "disrespect" by the Harper government, while former governments met with him regularly for briefings and to discuss his reports.

Last spring, Environment Canada Minister Peter Kent suggested Vaughan's 2012 report, which discussed federal policies on climate change and contamination, was not credible.

Vaughan will take on a new position as president and CEO of the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

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Today federal scientists from Environment Canada presented research at an international toxicology conference in the U.S. that indicates contaminants from the Alberta tar sands are polluting the landscape on a scale much larger than previously thought.

A team lead by federal scientist Jane Kirk discovered contaminants in lakes as far as 100 kilometers away from tar sands operations. The federal research confirms and expands upon the hotly contested findings of aquatic scientist David Schindler who, in 2010, found pollution from the tar sands accumulating on the landscape up to 50 kilometers away.

"That means the footprint is four times bigger than we found," Schindler told Postmedia News.

Senior scientist Derek Muir, who presented some of the findings at Wednesday's conference, said the contaminated region is "potentially larger than we might have anticipated." The 'legacy' of chemicals in lake sediment gives evidence that tar sands pollution has been traveling long distances for decades. Samples show the build up of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, known to cause cancer in humans and to be toxic to aquatic animals, in 6 remote and undisturbed lakes up to 100 kilometers away from tar sands operations.

The pollutants are "petrogenic" in nature, meaning they are petroleum derived, and have steadily and dramatically increased since the 1970s, showing the contaminant levels "seem to parallel the development of the oilsands industry," Muir said.

After the release of Schindler's groundbreaking research on tar sands pollution in 2010 the Alberta government claimed the contaminants were naturally occurring and posed no risk to aquatic life.

However at today's conference, the annual meeting of the North American Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Kirk discussed the long list of 'priority pollutants' that accumulate in the region's snow. Within 50 kilometers of the tar sands, snowpack contains numerous contaminants including dangerous neurotoxins, such as methyl mercury, that bioaccumulate in food webs. Kirk found priority pollutants in the air were 1.5 to 13 times higher at test sites within 50 kilometers of tar sands refineries, and highest within 10 kilometers.

Abstracts for Kirk, Parrott and Muir's presentations can be found on pages 103 and 104 of the conference programme (pdf).

"We don't really know the fate of the various metals including mercury as they go from snow, to melt water to run-off and then into the aquatic environment," Muir told Postmedia.

The toxicity of melt water from snow falling in the tar sands region was researched by federal scientist Joanne Parrott, who also presented at the conference. Studying snow samples taken in 2011 and 2012 along the Athabasca River, Parrott found that the melt water was toxic to minnow larvae, even when diluted down to 25 percent. "The larval fish don't do very well in that snow at all," she said.

Parrott suggests melt water, once mixed with water from the Athabasca River, will no longer be toxic to minnows.

Snow melt, however, provides a significant amount of water to tributaries where fish hatch in the spring, says Schindler. "My big concern is that slowly because of mortalities at spring melt, that this will erode the fishery, killing off the embryos," he told Postmedia, pointing to the abnormally low numbers of fish in the Muskeg River as a possible occurrence.

Parrott plans to expand her research to consider whether young fish in tributaries that feed the Athabasca River are affected by the pollution.

Schindler's research has already highlighted the increasing incidence of fish deformity in areas downstream of tar sands operations, like Lake Athabasca. "I think what could happen is that the few embryos that manage to survive, deformed as they are, struggle down to Lake Athabasca," he said, adding the fish look "so horrible" the First Nations who depend on them for survival will not eat them, even if they don't have confirmed high levels of contaminants.

"I think that's fair enough, they wouldn't sell in Safeway," Schindler commented.

The scientists' presence at the conference is significant given the Harper government's strict control of scientific communications surrounding the tar sands. Federal scientists were prevented from speaking with the media at the same conference in Boston last year.

An internal document uncovered by Postmedia instructed federal scientists to avoid answering media questions, saying "if scientists are approached for interviews at the conference, the EC communications policy will be followed by referring the journalist to the media relations…phone number. An appropriate spokesperson will then be identified depending on journalist questions."

After Postmedia's Mike De Souza released the internal document last week, Environment Canada made arrangements for the news agency to speak with both Muir and Parrott.

Postmedia's Margaret Munro explains: "Environment Canada earlier this month said scientists were not available to comment on their findings of contamination around the oilsands. The department’s media office arranged this week’s interviews with Muir and Parrott after Postmedia News obtained details of the reports the scientists will present at the U.S. conference on Wednesday."

As DeSmog covered in an earlier post, the Harper government's heavy-handed treatment of federal scientists led to a mass demonstration this summer, where scientists and academics mourned the "Death of Evidence," claiming "Stephen Harper Hates Science." 

The government's strict communications policy is seen by some as an attempt to silence critics voicing science-based opposition to development of the tar sands.

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The Canadian government is working hard behind the scenes to cover up the negative effects that tar sands extraction is having on the local environment, wildlife, communities and the global climate. According to Access to Information documents obtained by Postmedia's Mike De Souza, the Stephen Harper government has actively suppressed the release of vital information regarding the spread of tar sands contamination by muzzling federal scientists.

The gag order, according to De Souza, came on the heels of a newly researched government report in November 2011 which confirmed the findings of University of Alberta scientists Erin N. Kelly and David Schindler. The scientists discovered concentrations of toxics such as heavy metals were higher near tar sands operations, showing a positive correlation between tar sands activity and the spread of contaminants in the local environment.

The government of Canada and the government of Alberta denied the correlation, saying local waterways tested showed no signs of toxic contamination and reports of mutated and cancerous fish downstream from the tar sands were unfounded.

The document uncovered by De Souza shows that federal scientists who could confirm the University of Alberta results were restricted from speaking to the media: "If scientists are approached for interviews at the conference, the [Environment Canada] communications policy will be followed by referring the journalist to the media relations…phone number. An appropriate spokesperson will then be identified depending on journalist questions."

Federal scientists were also given a list of scripted responses, explaining government tests in the spring of 2010 showed no toxics in the Athabasca River and established no links between contaminants and abnormal and sick fish.

Scientists were also directed to avoid questions regarding environmental monitoring of the tar sands and the role Environment Canada plays in the region with this scripted line: "I am a scientist. I'm not in a position to answer that question but I'd be happy to refer you to an appropriate spokesperson."

David Schindler, co-author of the 2010 University of Alberta study commented, "it is a good study, and [the author] is a very fine young scientist, who should be trusted to comment on her own results."

"Similarly, Derek Muir, her supervisor and co-author, is one of the world's top contamination experts, and Canadians should be ashamed that he cannot discuss results directly with the public, but must go through an official spokesperson."

In 2010, the results of Kelly and Schindler's contaminant analysis caused an uproar in Alberta and federal governments. Eager to promote expansion in the tar sands, the Canadian government failed to install a sound and independent monitoring system for the region.

Any data used to support the government's official position, that no contamination had occurred, was supplied by the oil and gas industry.

Schindler conducted a basic analysis of waterways in the region, sampling water both upstream from tar sands operations, and downstream. What Schindler and his team discovered was a considerable accumulation of pollutants in water downstream from tar sands development which includes open-pit mining and refining.

Most notably, Schindler discovered that airborne pollutants were being deposited on land, far from contaminated waterways like the Athabasca River. It was Schindler who first recognized the role snow was playing in the transportation and depositing of tar sands pollution.

These land-based pollutants mirrored contamination of waterways. Schindler found that "embryos of fish exposed to oilsands' water and sediment have very high rates of mortality, and among the survivors, there are very high rates of deformities."

His research confirmed the concerns of local communities, First Nations and environmental groups that the fast-tracking of tar sands expansion without careful monitoring was having negative effects on the environment and those living downstream.

The findings also contradicted research conducted by the industry/government group Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program (RAMP), a group Schindler claims "violated every rule" of long-term study.

In perhaps one of Canada's most scandalous moments in recent history, Dr. Schindler was publicly discredited by the provincial and federal government. His research and his credibility were called into question when the Alberta government went on record to say his study – which was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – was biased and that contaminants in the region's watershed occur naturally and not as a result of industrial activities.

The treatment Schindler received as a result of his research concerned scientists across Canada, many of whom felt the federal government was conduction a 'witch hunt' to silence information that might fuel opposition to the tar sands.

Schindler's experience was just one of many reasons why scientists from across Canada held a mock memorial this summer on Parliament Hill, mourning the "Death of Evidence," caused by the muzzling of scientists by the federal government.

The motto of the event was clear: "Stephen Harper Hates Science."

To this day no clear environmental monitoring program is in place to track and analyze the effects that tar sands extraction and refining has on the local environment. Last month the Alberta government announced the creation of a new scientific body to monitor the impacts of development, which Diana McQueen, the province's Environment Minister, suggests will be 'credible' and operate at an 'arms-length' from industry and government. The plan, however, has yet to take any real shape.

"This is yet another plan to develop a plan," said Greenpeace energy and climate campaigner Mike Hudema. "There is still no funding commitment and no clear governance model to ensure independence. The province should stop approving new projects based on flawed data and incomplete information until this gets sorted out."

Image credit: Jodi Stark

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