June 15,
2013. Toxic Lakes: Alberta Recreation
Areas of the Future.
“I. The world’s oil
party is coming to a dramatic close, and Canada has adopted a new geodestiny:
providing the United States with bitumen, a low-quality, high-cost substitute.”
--- A Declaration of a Political
Emergency by Andrew Nikiforuk
NOTE: Major Keystone XL sit-in in Chicago this weekend: June
15-16
Here are some facts
about the “tailings ponds”, a euphemism for toxic lakes that are being
created in the Oil Sands area. These come from Andrew Nikiforuk’s book, Tar
Sands: Dirty oil and a future of a continent (2010), and from Hugh McCullum’s
report entitled “Fueling Fortress America”, commissioned by the Polaris
Institute, the Parkland Institute and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
1 Enough toxic sludge- contaminated water is produced ever y day to fill 720 Olympic pools: 3 barrels for every barrel of oil produced.
2 There are 120 sq km of toxic lakes as of 2010 and growing rapidly.
3 They are surrounded by earthen dams that rise an average of 82 m above the forest floor. They were never designed to be that high.
4 Nearly a dozen of them on are placed on either side of the Athabasca River
5 “Even at -30 C, the water does not freeze. It just sits there steaming. The stench from these ponds is indescribable.” says Steven Borsy, an oil sands worker.
6 The Syncrude toxic lake, built in 1973, is 23 km long and holds 550 billion liters of water, sand and toxic sludge as of 2010. It is the world’s second biggest artificial lake after China’s Three Gorges Dam reservoir which has swallowed up 13 major cities.
7 Already Syncrude’s “tailings ponds” are bigger and more plentiful than the natural lakes in the area.
8 Two nasty pollutants in the toxic lakes: PAHs or Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Naphthenic Acids. Half of PAHs tested are known human carcinogens. Naphthenic Acids comprise 2% of the bitumen deposits. These acids kill fish, are one of the key ingredients in napalm bombs and are used as fungicides and wood preservatives.
9 Most of the toxic lakes now leak so badly that they have created toxic wetlands near their bases. Indigenous fish, amphibians, and nesting birds live here and live short, disease-filled lives. They were supposed to be a temporary solution to a dangerous problem. It now looks like they will Alberta’s problem after the oil sands have been sucked dry.
10 There is nowhere near enough money being put on deposit by oil companies to reclaim these lakes even if it were possible.
11 Every year, thousands of ducks, geese, shorebirds, moose, deer and beaver are swallowed up by these ponds to drown, die of hypothermia, or if they survive, to die of cancer later.
12 The latest genius solution is “End-pit lakes”. Toxic lake contents will be piped into old mine sites (from open pit oil sands mines) topped with billions of liters of fresh water, and then.... pray for a miracle. Solves two problems at once: the left-over open pit mines and the toxic lake contents. The only thing missing for this solution is the miracle.
This is from an Alberta Oil Industry 2012 Document describing how an End-pit Lake will look (described in Point #12 above). Like I said, the only technical issue missing to make this a reality is a miracle.
And here is a news story from this week just to show you that the Alberta regulator is on top of this problem.
Posted on
June 12, 2013 – Ian Angus
Breaking tar sands rules?
Regulator says that’s okay
Here’s a
suggestion for Alberta drivers. The next time a cop stops you for
speeding, tell him that the highway code is overly optimistic. He’ll let you
go.
If you
don’t have a valid drivers license, tell him you were overly optimistic about
your ability to pass the test. He’ll let you continue driving.
At least
he will if you get the same treatment as the super polluters who mine the
Alberta tar sands.
In the Tailings
Management Assessment Report released this week, the Alberta Energy
Resources Conservation Board (ECRB) says that no tar sands company has complied
with regulations requiring them to clean up their tailings ponds. But that’s
okay, there will be no penalty, because the regulator says the standards the
industry agreed to in 2009 were ”overly optimistic.”
“Tailings
ponds” is a euphemistic name for massive lakes of toxic sludge, used to store
the liquid effluent created by tar sands mining. For every barrel of oil
there are six barrels of this oily goo. Of the 25 chemicals found in every
tailings pond, 14 are known carcinogens. The ponds themselves are large enough
to be seen from space — over 900 million cubic metres, covering an area greater
than 170 square kilometres.
In
theory, the poisons eventually sink to the bottom. leaving clean water that can
be reused. In theory, the land will eventually be reclaimed and returned to its
original state. In practice not one has been reclaimed, and they are leaking
poison into the Athabaska river.
In 2009,
after a public outcry when 1600 migrating birds landed in a tailings pond and
died, the industry’s tame regulator finally set some rules. Directive 074
required the mining companies to reduce the fine particles in the poisoned
water by 20% in 2011, 30% by 2012 and 50% by 2013.
Not only
have those targets not been met, the total volume of tailings dumped into the
Alberta landscape has risen 27% since the regulations were established.
But
that’s okay. The executive manager of the ERCB says:
“Both
industry and ourselves are finding that we were overly optimistic as to how
quickly they could integrate various significant tailings management equipment
and operations into those complex facilities.”
In other
words, it isn’t easy being green, so we won’t insist.
The ERCB
report does not set any new compliance targets, and it does not plan to report
on tailings again for two years. Given the
industry’s long record of successfully evading regulation, no one should be
overly optimistic about a tailings cleanup.
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