Here's an excerpt from a great piece on the Alberta Oil Sands that appears in the March issue of National Geographic. The Oil Sands, which produce what Greenpeace calls the "dirtiest oil in the world", have been an economic boon to the province of Alberta, and in some ways to all of Canada but their environmental impact is causing many people to call into question their ongoing development.
While the high carbon emissions and pollution of waterways are hard to dispute, proponents argue that a period of financial crisis is not the time to further stall economic development. However, we heard the opposite argument a few months ago when oil prices were in the stratosphere and defenders of the Oil Sands argued any slowdown would only exacerbate the problem of high energy costs.
From a helicopter it's easy to see the industry's impact on the
Athabasca Valley. Within minutes of lifting off from Fort McMurray,
heading north along the east bank of the river, you pass over Suncor's
Millennium mine—the company's leases extend practically to the town. On
a day with a bit of wind, dust plumes billowing off the wheels and the
loads of the dump trucks coalesce into a single enormous cloud that
obscures large parts of the mine pit and spills over its lip. To the
north, beyond a small expanse of intact forest, a similar cloud rises
from the next pit, Suncor's Steepbank mine, and beyond that lie two
more, and across the river two more. One evening last July the clouds
had merged into a band of dust sweeping west across the devastated
landscape. It was being sucked into the updraft of a storm cloud. In
the distance steam and smoke and gas flames belched from the stacks of
the Syncrude and Suncor upgraders—"dark satanic mills" inevitably come
to mind, but they're a riveting sight all the same. From many miles
away, you could smell the tarry stench. It stings your lungs when you
get close enough.
From the air, however, the mines fall away quickly. Skimming low over the river, startling a young moose that was fording a narrow channel, a government biologist named Preston McEachern and I veered northwest toward the Birch Mountains, over vast expanses of scarcely disturbed forest. The Canadian boreal forest covers two million square miles, of which around 75 percent remains undeveloped. The oil sands mines have so far converted over 150 square miles—a hundredth of a percent of the total area—into dust, dirt, and tailings ponds. Expansion of in situ extraction could affect a much larger area. At Suncor's Firebag facility, northeast of the Millennium mine, the forest has not been razed, but it has been dissected by roads and pipelines that service a checkerboard of large clearings, in each of which Suncor extracts deeply buried bitumen through a cluster of wells. Environmentalists and wildlife biologists worry that the widening fragmentation of the forest, by timber as well as mineral companies, endangers the woodland caribou and other animals. "The boreal forest as we know it could be gone in a generation without major policy changes," says Steve Kallick, director of the Pew Boreal Campaign, which aims to protect 50 percent of the forest.
McEachern, who works for Alberta Environment, a provincial agency, says the tailings ponds are his top concern. The mines dump wastewater in the ponds, he explains, because they are not allowed to dump waste into the Athabasca, and because they need to reuse the water. As the thick, brown slurry gushes from the discharge pipes, the sand quickly settles out, building the dike that retains the pond; the residual bitumen floats to the top. The fine clay and silt particles, though, take several years to settle, and when they do, they produce a yogurt-like goop—the technical term is "mature fine tailings"—that is contaminated with toxic chemicals such as naphthenic acid and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and would take centuries to dry out on its own. Under the terms of their licenses, the mines are required to reclaim it somehow, but they have been missing their deadlines and still have not fully reclaimed a single pond.
What to do? Here are Alberta's Oil Sands, next door to the world's biggest energy consumer who yearns for a dependable supply of oil from a non-terrorism supporting source... Perfect, right? Maybe not.
In any case, the Oil Sands have a tricky environmental problem and trickier PR problem to tackle.
Read the whole piece here. Make sure you check out the article's pictures here.
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