Halt oilsands: water expert
Athabasca River at risk, says renowned U of A scientist
Kate Jaimet, Ottawa Citizen; CanWest News Service
Published: 8:59 am
OTTAWA - The scientist who won Canada's top research prize for his work on pollution in the Great Lakes now wants a moratorium on development in the Alberta oilsands, saying the rush to extract petroleum could threaten the mighty Athabasca River.
"They ought to put a moratorium, or at least a major slowdown, in oilsands development until some of the issues are looked at," said David Schindler, a professor of ecology at the University of Alberta. "It's complete nonsense to proceed full-bore with all of these developments and not to have a healthy monitoring program."
But the head of oilsands science at Alberta's environment department says a moratorium is unnecessary and could be harmful in a socio-economic sense.
"A moratorium doesn't help anybody. It just puts science at odds with society," said Preston McEachern. "We need to be able to manage it within its capacity limits ... If we're not past those limits, why would we have a moratorium?"
Schindler was awarded the $1-million Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering in 2001 for decades of work in water science and has won four international environmental awards. He identified phosphates in detergent as the pollutant killing Lake Erie in the 1960s and pinpointed acid rain as the cause of fish deaths in the Great Lakes in the 1970s and 1980s.
Now he's concerned oilsands developers are sucking too much water out of the Athabasca River -- one of Alberta's major waterways -- and may be allowing toxic chemicals to seep back into it.
The Athabasca begins in the Columbia Icefield of the Rocky Mountains and winds 1,500 kilometres through Alberta's boreal forest, past pulp mills and through the oilsands around Fort McMurray, before emptying into Lake Athabasca in the northeast corner of the province.
Data released to CanWest News Service by Environment Canada and provincial environmental agencies indicate the water quality in the Athabasca declines as it moves downstream, from a rating of "excellent" as it leaves Jasper National Park to "marginal" near its outflow.
The data was compiled between 2003 and 2005 as part of a monitoring study assessing the quality of freshwater across Canada and will be released this Thursday in the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators 2007 report.
McEachern blames declining water-quality ratings as the Athabasca moves downstream in part to nutrients that run off into the river from the soil of the boreal forest and from the pulp mills along its banks.
The rating is also driven down by low oxygen levels that sometimes occur in the river, particularly in the winter, McEachern said.
In the winter, the dead vegetation that has washed into the river over the year lies at the bottom and decays, consuming oxygen.
Since the river is covered with ice, it cannot draw oxygen from the air to replace what is lost. The resulting low oxygen levels can lead to the death of overwintering fish eggs, McEachern said.
But Schindler said evidence indicates the lower the water level in the river, the less dissolved oxygen there will be and the greater the chance of such deaths occurring.
Large amounts of water are taken from the river for use in oilsands extraction -- between two and four barrels to produce one barrel of synthetic crude.
Figures from Alberta Environment show mining operations took 78 million cubic metres of water from the river in 2006. But existing and approved operations are licensed to take almost five times that much: 363 million cubic metres. And extraction from the oilsands is expected to nearly quadruple over the next two decades, to four million barrels of oil a day in 2030, up from 1.1 million barrels a day now.
"Once they take water from the river, it doesn't go back because it's too contaminated," Schindler said.
There's also the danger that fish won't get into their shallow spawning and rearing tributaries if the water is too low. Schindler said the province does not have a good idea of how much water is needed in the river to maintain a healthy habitat for fish to live and spawn.
But McEachern disagrees.
He said the years between 1998 and 2005 were spent assessing the flow needs of the river and coming up with guidelines to determine how much water oil companies can take from the Athabasca at any given time.
The amount of water allocated to oilsands companies is less than four per cent of the annual flow of the river, he added. And in dry years, companies can be restricted to less than their full allocation, he said.
"It's all about calculating the amount of fish habitat that's lost due to water withdrawals," McEachern said. "It determines the amount of water that needs to be left in the river for each week of the year."
Schindler's previous work has shown the volume of flow in the Athabasca is already 30 per cent lower than historic levels. The water used for petroleum extraction is stored in huge, toxic tailing ponds that now cover an area of more than 50 square kilometres, according to a recent report by the Pembina Institute.
Schindler said no one really knows whether toxins are seeping from the tailings into the river. But McEachern said the companies monitor for leaks, and there is no evidence that seepage is a problem.
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© The Edmonton Journal 2007
