Digging Alberta’s Environment an Oily Grave

In the early 1960s, Manley Natland initiated a plan to nuke much of northeastern Alberta. The purpose of this nuclear landscaping project was to superheat and compress the oil in the Athabasca region’s bitumous soil so that it would become less viscous and then pool into the cavities left by the underground explosions. Both the Albertan and Canadian governments had approved the project, but a new federal election delayed it. Interest in the oil sands subsided, and American oil corporations changed their focus to Alaska. Alberta’s oil, being mixed in with the sand, remained unprofitable to extract until quite recently. Improvements in technology and soaring crude prices have brought an economic boom and environmental devastation to Alberta. The Canadian and Albertan governments must intervene so that the oil is extracted with as little environmental impact as possible, otherwise, the consequences will be tragic.

The oil sands cover 140,200 square kilometers, an area greater than Florida. More importantly, according to Shell Canada Chief Clive Mather, “The total estimates could be two trillion [barrels of crude] or even higher.” This is only an estimate, but for some perspective, consider that Saudi Arabia has 264.3 billion barrels of proven reserves. Companies will not forgo the exploitation of such a valuable resource, but they could be forced to do so in a responsible manner by both the provincial and federal levels of government.

The Canadian environmental policy is, frankly, a joke—as the 36th in world population, Canada manages to be the eighth largest producer of greenhouse gases. There has been no serious action on the part of the Conservative party to reduce emissions, and the new climate change policy abandons Kyoto Protocol targets entirely. Instead of curtailing the environmental impact of the oil sands, the policy exempts the entire industry from mandatory emissions reductions. Prime Minister Stephen Harper only agreed to adopt the recent Bali Roadmap after President Bush unexpectedly signed on. I suppose being seen as even more environmentally regressive than the United States was simply too embarrassing.

Canada has always played follow the leader with the U. S., and the case of the oil sands is no different. As the world’s largest exporter of oil to America, Canada is more than willing to let Americans have their way in the Athabasca region. A 60 Minutes piece by Bob Simon introduced many Americans to the oil sands in 2006, when he described the landscape as an “arctic wasteland.” While Simon was standing in the middle of an oil mine—which was in fact a wasteland—it wasn’t always so. The surrounding land is still covered in the boreal forests and muskeg bogs that were destroyed in order to extract the oil. There are no requirements to restore the land to its original condition after a mine has been depleted, in contrast to logging companies that plant new trees after clear cutting.

Perhaps the most environmentally irresponsible aspect of the oil sands operation is the use of fresh water. Hot water is used to separate the bitumen from the soil. And to extract one gallon of synthetic crude oil, it takes between two and five gallons of water. Some of this water is recycled, but much of it is cast off into man-made tailing ponds too toxic or corrosive to support any sort of significant ecosystem.

Still, you cannot blame the people of Alberta for wanting to maintain a standard of living that is 24 percent higher than the Canadian national average in 2006. Nevertheless, there is a pervasive and myopic greed in the province that absolutely needs to be confronted. Bob Simon concluded his 60 Minutes piece by staring at a handful of soil and saying, “It may look like topsoil, but all it grows is money.” This is the kind of narrow-minded thought process that led to the approval of wide-scale nuclear weapons use in the 1960s. Corporations as powerful as juggernauts are charging ahead with unproven technologies, heedless of the consequences. Even their attempts at being green are not tested properly and often backfire. The recapturing of carbon dioxide and its use in the pressurization of depleted wells has led to fissures through which toxins escape into the surrounding environment, a problem that has been linked to ecological dead zones and deformities in cattle.

These little accidents, for which companies like EnCana refuse to take responsibility, can be at least partially avoided with implementation of a stricter environmental policy at the provincial and federal levels of government. The oil sands industry should not be exempt from carbon emissions reductions and should not be granted tax breaks. There should be tougher limits on water use, such as the forced adoption of in-situ extraction techniques that require less water. Companies should be required to restore the mined land to its original condition. New technologies should be tested more extensively, so that unforeseen negative consequences are less common. None of these policy changes will happen, however, unless the average person stops looking at bitumous soil in terms of how much money it can grow. This includes the Americans who buy Albertan oil all over the country.

Duncan Kluwak is a senior in the School of Engineering and Applied Science majoring in mechanical engineering.