Day 1 (Part 2) Tar Sands Canoe Trip

Tuesday August 6    “No significant impact”

            At 7, we meet at the McMurray Aviation hangar at the Ft Mac airport. Nine of us (three per plane) go up in Cessna 172s for an hour to get an aerial view of some of the tar sand developments. While waiting we are handed glossy booklets on the tar sands industry. Among other things, I read that “studies have shown that the oil sands development have had no significant impact on the Athabasca River.” I already know that this is absolute fiction. David Schindler (U of Alberta) and co-workers’ studies on the river and the tar sands impact published in 2011, as well as more recent studies, show clearly that the impact is important and growing. They liken the amount of tar sands toxins, from aerial deposition over the winter on snow,  that go into the Athabasca River as the snow melts to a major oil spill in the river every spring. Important enough that their report caused the federal government  to initiate a high level scientific review panel. The panel’s report concurred with what Schindler and others have been saying for years: the government and industry have not been doing a serious job of  monitoring the air and water. What is not known, you cannot be blamed for.

                                  An aerial view of an outlet of used water flowing into a Tailings Pond. 

Companies now recycle water for the upgraders something like 10 times. However, when they are done with it, it is dirty as you can see. They wait for the gunk (some of it) to settle out. Some of the pollutants never will. In the meantime, a significant amount is leaking into the groundwater and the river.

 

            The main area of approved projects is approximately 400 km x 400 km: almost all of it has been given over to projects with more approved in the two smaller areas of tar sands: in the Peace River and Cold Lake areas. No matter how far we fly, there are more projects in the distance. What we see are the open pit mines and associated sandy desert landscapes left after mining, the many toxic lakes of highly polluted water euphemistically called tailings ponds, and the current mining and upgrading operations (separating the tar from the sand using natural gas and water from the Athabasca River). The gargantuan mining trucks crawling in long lines like Dinky Toys, the conveyor belts taking the dumped tar sand into the upgraders, the smoke stacks and the upgrader buildings: all icons of a dystopic future.

                                                                    Suncor upgrader

            We also see sulfur in neat yellow square piles perhaps 500 m in length extracted from the bitumen. Bitumen, the “tar” in tar sands, is 5% sulphur. We also see a reclamation site: small, with grass and a pond, and also an area of black ooze surfacing within it: clearly the 0.15% of the mining area already reclaimed still needs work.   

             We see empty bison paddocks. We have already heard that the bison, the showpiece of reclamation PR, cannot be left here too long as they become sick from the poisoned air. We also were told by a FMFN band member of a generous donation by one of the oil companies of bison meat from this herd, donated to local first nations. The meat had to be thrown away as it contained high levels of lead.

                                           Aerial view of empty bison paddock

            

Two interesting thing we learn from our pilot, whose father has worked for years in the tar sands. There is a Suncor oil refinery that was under construction here. He says that after spending $5 billion the company abandoned construction. I do not know why.

            He also tells us that the Crane Hill reclaimed area (where the Healing Walk in July began) is not actually reclaimed. It is a large pile of “overburden” which is the soil and subsoil scraped away before accessing the oil sands to be mined.

 

            After the flights, at Tim Horton’s in Ft Mac, we meet with Rod Hyde, the retired principal of the Ft McKay school who is the widower of the former chief of the Ft McKay FN, Dorothy McDonald. His daughter, Dayle, is the Band’s communication officer. Rod tells us how Dorothy and the Band took one of the oil companies to court for compensation for a major oil spill after the Alberta government refused to act, saying that it preferred to work with the oil companies so that it did not happen again. She was the chief when the band formed the Ft McKay Group of Companies, to perform tar sand industry services which are now grossing $100 million per year. The Community members are well off. Ft McKay therefore has an inherent conflict between the environmental damage being done to their ancestral lands and the huge profits they are reaping from the oil sands. This is a common theme we will hear about repeatedly.

            Rod also advises us about the latest Alberta Energy Regulator ruling. Today they approved a lease for a new SAGD (Steam assisted gravity drainage) tar sands project (the Dover Commercial Project).  It is adjacent to Ft McKay FN lands referred to as the Moose Lake Reserve, 50 km northwest of Ft McKay. The reserve contains Moose Lake where many FMFN members have built cabins and there are also band-owned cabins. According to the Ft McKay FN website:

“This particular area in our traditional territory is sacred to the community of Fort McKay and is the resting place of many of our ancestors.”

“Moose Lake is one of the only areas far enough away from oil sands development where the people of Fort McKay can hunt, trap, fish, and pick berries safely and in peace. Fort McKay First Nation is committed to the protection and preservation of Moose Lake in order to ensure our children and grandchildren have a clean, peaceful place to keep our traditions and culture alive.”

            Apparently this will soon no longer be the case. The Ft McKay Band had asked for a 20 km buffer zone around the lake for the above reasons. They are being granted 1.2 km. The lease holder is Brion Energy Corporation, a joint venture between Athabasca Oil Corp. and PetroChina Co. (now Pheonix Energy Holdings), promises to exploit the resource “in an environmentally acceptable manner”. The Dover project is expected to produce approximately 4.1 billion barrels of bitumen. At $50 per barrel of bitumen, that amounts to $200 billion. One quarter of that amount would have been lost if the Alberta Energy Regulator or Brion Energy could have dialed back their greed and given in to Ft McKay’s request. Ft McKay FN will appeal. 

            As if to highlight the risks involved in SAGD projects, we also learn from Rod and other sources today that there is currently a major underground and surface spill of bitumen from a SAGD operation in the Cold Lake area to the south. It has been going on for 2 weeks, and approximately 1 million liters of bitumen have so far leaked out. There is so far no known method to stop the flow. In a SAGD operation, tar sands deep underground are heated with hot water pipes and another series of deeper pipes, in theory, collects the melted tar.

            Spills are common. When I was in Ft Mac for the Healing Walk a month earlier there was a substantial pipeline spill south of Ft Mac. Three hundred people, mostly from the Fort McMurray FN, were involved in the clean-up efforts, we were told by a FMFN band member.

            We get back to our campsite late, make a campfire, eat a bit and to bed. The evening is cool and there are thankfully few mosquitoes.