And if all the oilsands projects now on the books are constructed, that contamination could grow nearly sevenfold and potentially leave a massive legacy of poisoned groundwater.
"This is one of the ominous parts of this," said Matt Price of Environmental Defence, who authored the report being released Tuesday.
"It could very well take a generation for this stuff to show up. And by that time, you can't stop it."
Of course, there's nothing to worry about, nothing to see here. Move along...
But the director of oilsands environmental management for the Alberta government said the report makes several mistaken assumptions.
Yes, mistaken assumptions abound. I am completely sure of that. And I have absolute faith in the Alberta Government Office of Oilsands Development to be diligent in their pursuit of such mistaken assumptions. That's why I have invested heavily in whitewash futures. The massive scar that is being hacked into the Alberta landscape is already visible from space and set to expand by a factor of seven. And all of the toxic effluence that flows from the process is going to be contained by earthen dykes. Check. That is guaranteed to be a success. And just how much waste are we talking?
Oilsands tailings are created as hot water is used to separate bitumen from the sand and clay that holds it. Between 2,000 and 2,500 litres of tailings are produced for every barrel of bitumen. Tailings ponds now cover about 130 square kilometres in the Fort McMurray area.
2,000 to 2,500 litres of tailings per barrel of bitumen! And that hot water, well fuck me if Alberta's madness isn't already burning up enough natural gas to heat three million homes to generate those thousands of litres of hot water.
And all of those mistaken assumptions... where might those have originated, hmmm?
Price and analysts from the environmental think-tank Pembina Consulting collected data from oilsands companies themselves on how much water they expect is leaking from their tailings ponds.
The total was just over 11 million litres a day. Over the course of a year, that's enough water to fill the Toronto Skydome 2 1/2 times.
The tailings are known to be harmful, containing chemicals that are both toxic and carcinogenic.
Once upon a time an insurance dude explained to me that they used maps that helped them to generate regional cost benefit analyses. That was the first time I heard the term "cancer blooms". I don't think one needs to be a seer to predict the eventual outcome of the shortsighted greed that is powering these massive toxic reservoirs.
Price says not enough is known about the flow of water once it seeps into the ground or whether it finds its way into the Athabasca River system.
"The joint panels (reviewing the oilsands project applications) keep on saying, 'We need more information on groundwater. We don't have it, but here's your approval anyway.'
"This stuff will eventually make its way down river. You might be building up this massive pulse of contaminants into the groundwater now that are going to show up."
That would be my bet, regardless of the powdered sugar that Alberta Environment is sprinkling on turds.
But Preston McEachern of Alberta Environment says that most of the seepage from tailings ponds goes into aquifers so deep that they themselves are contaminated by flowing through the oilsands.
Of course they do. Hush now, there's poison money in that thar filth. And while the source of the contamination is naturally occurring, the concentration of toxins is manmade and won't be managed by wishing or fibs.
"These seepages are not connecting directly with the external environment."
Giant toxic lakes, no connection whatsoever. Check!
However, he does acknowledge that the long-term fate of the mine tailings is an issue.
"With respect to long-term contamination of groundwater aquifers, yes, it's a problem."
Some ponds do sit on top of shallow aquifers, which now must be continually pumped out and the water poured back into the ponds - not a permanent solution.
I imagine that the insurance industry cartographers will be spilling a lot of blood red ink on the maps of the Athabasca river basin over the next few decades.
22 comments:
Given the panty-tugging mewling and shrieking regarding Western separation these days, it occurs to me to suggest that Alberta is more than welcome to piss off and take their $50/barrel oil (that costs $60/barrel to produce at the moment) with them, under the condition that they guarantee that all that contaminated groundwater in no way leeches its way back into Canada.
I want that guarantee, and I want it in writing. Then they can fuck right off.
Who cares, really? I wouldn't live there, so they can go ahead and sleep in their own shit. Just keep electing conservative oil company bootlickers into office. It's doing wonderful things for you. Pffffftttt!! Who needs that limp-wristed 'liberal' environment policy anyway? My kids love our fine Alberta toxic bilge water. Bottoms up!
The only thing that bothers me are the effects on the rest of the country, particularly on the economy and the climate. Oh, and we have to listen to them bitch about equalization formulas, when they sucked from the teat of the rest of Canada during the early 20th century, but now they feel like they should be greedy dicks. And I thought Quebec complained a lot.
You're all just jealous of Alberta and its precious fluids.
And you, know when the whole goes tits up on them...and. it. will...guess who'll they'll blame?
..yes, because apparently the drinking water in Walkerton has been pristine for years.. oh, wait, yeah, 8 people died and 2,300were ill..
..oh, and the Great Lakes are also a great place to grab a glass of agua..
" There have also been observations of fecal matter pollution from sewage, which results in harmful bacteria such as E. coli and enterococci (Liu et al 2006). Both sewage and other organic and inorganic wastes cause the water quality to decline and bacteria growth to increase (Shear 2006)."
.."Polychlorinate biphenyls (PCBs) have been found in the Great Lakes and are a result of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry 2001). Chloro-diphenyl-tichloroethane, commonly known as DDT, was found in all mussel tissue testing sites and is the most common chemical pollutant in the Great Lakes. According to the results from the mussel testing, dieldrin is the second most prevalent pollutant in the Great Lakes, behind DDT. Lindane is also a very harmful insecticide which was found in the tissues Great Lake trout and walleye (Robertson 1998). Another detrimental insecticide, toxaphene, breaks down very slowly in water, so it is still found in the lakes today even though it was banned in 1990 (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry 1997)."
..spare me the sanctimonious complaints about Alberta.. I have concerns regarding the Athabasca river too.. but apparently we're more concerned about "climate change" in this country and ACTUAL polution is just not "sexy enough" for guys like David Suzuki and Al Gore..
Politics is so stupid.. we do have serious difficulties to address.. but we constantly get side-tracked by the "cause-du-jour"..
My answer (being a lawyer) - toxic tort legislation.. open to affected groups, including recreational users, to sue when the government won't take action themselves.. with massive punitive damage potential for clear negligence and harm to the environment.. but, apparently, while Mercury, PCB's, and ecoli are continuing to be pumped into our water systems.. our Liberal party is hard at work making sure we cut down on Co2.. and our Conservatives are doing even less.
Once people know that one of the perks of chemical pollution is "little penises" maybe people will take polluting more seriously and give up on the CO2 crap.
PS
I'm thankful I was born way, way before these types of defects.
Who are you and what have you done with Wayne? ;-)
.spare me the sanctimonious complaints about Alberta..
Ok, we will. After all, we don't want to make Albertans angry, do we?
They might threaten to separate...
roblaw, we can thank mike harris and his conservative government's disgusting notions of downloading responsibility to the municipal level for the walkerton tragedy. and if you look around big steve's caucus what do you see? graduates of the mike harris gang. i am most curious to see which of our public trusts they decide to deal off to their buddies for pennies on the dollar.
..psa.. here's the thing.. first, it's east vs. west in the "who's polluting what" game.. then it's Red vs. Blue..
You've got a Conservative, who is a party constituency President - who is admitting "we need to press our government to do more".. our CONSERVATIVE government..
Is Harris to blame? Yup.. but I noticed that many of the pollution issues pre-existed Harris and continue to exist under McGuinty.. to suggest that Librals (can you say "did nothing to adopt Kyoto?") have clean hands in assuring we pay better attention to our environment.. or, that the NDP have also done everything possible to deal with environmental problems is, well, bullshit.. because way too much politics is about saying shit, but doing not very much..
I'm standing up saying, "as a Conservative, we're screwing up, we have to do more".. if you feel superior that a simple change in the party in government is the answer.. well, I think you're in denial..
But, but, dude... its the ECONOMY!
I admit that I know very little about the oilsands, but if the tar is simply in the soil itself, wouldn't there naturally be a lot of seepage of bitumens into the groundwater of the area? I know people who had visited, and lived there before the projects started, and they claim that the smell and pools of tar formed on the surface back in those days.
Now, on the issue of contaminated drinking water, several years ago there was a small community in N Ontario called Kashkatchewan (sp?), who were air lifted out due to a problem with their water treatment plant contaminating their drinking water. One of my friends was sent up to fix the problem, and he found it was improperly installed filters. He also noticed the government, in it's wisdom (provincial I think) constructed the plant downstream from the raw sewage of the village.
Another example of governmental ineptitude is complaints that First Nations people were destroying houses in remote communities, and a Ontario panel went to investigate. A carpentery contractor was one of those in the panel, and attributed the condition of the houses to being improperly constructed and built, with basements, on muskeg swamps. It was not the fault of the natives but of the designer.
Both these problems were partly avoidable if the government had used common sense.
well here's the thing, one of my objections to such campaigns (notably carried out by my brethren to the left of the spectrum) as that against anthropogenic global warming, is that has no real meaning to most of the non-scientific community. it is a null term. people do understand that pollution is bad. and people do understand that pollution is bad, no matter where it is generated.
as for an east/west divide, that is an unfortunate notion, as ontario is by no means clean. heading east down the 401 toward toronto on a summer day will disabuse one of the notion that we are in any way pollution free. air is supposed to be transparent. it is not a shot at albertans per se but in this case they are the ones facing the shale oil and tar sands problems. problems that are only growing in scale and possible consequence.
i'd like to see a national effort to think and act more wisely and cleaner. as tax payers we are pouring money into the tar pits and getting what in return? pollution that is on an unprecedented scale, that will last for generations to come. largely foreign owned corporate entities will drag every possible penny out of the muck in the short term and then disappear into the breeze, looking for the next profit. and all of this filth and effort serves only to prolong the collapse of the oil based lifestyle that anyone who isn't drunk on snot will recognize is inevitable.
long term mega-pollution for short term gain is not cool. blazing off the relatively clean natural gas that could be used to heat homes during the necessary conversion to highly insulated dwellings and buildings that are either newly built or retrofitted to use geothermal, passive solar or hybrid heating systems doesn't strike me as wise. given the knowledge of a looming fresh water crisis, turning 2,000 to 2,500 litres of water toxic to get a single barrel of bitumen is idiocy.
perhaps given the political instability we are experiencing at the federal level, we might have some leverage. all of our parties and leaders appear vulnerable and the drug of power might just be attractive enough to get them to listen to some of us for a change. it doesn't have to be the roundly demonized al gore or david suzuki. i mean the people on the street who seem to have a sense that things are changing. i know conservatives that are scared that their kids won't get to go outdoors to play because of dirty air and solar radiation. these are problems with consequences that are blind to partisan allegiance. so too must the solutions be.
I admit that I know very little about the oilsands
Me too, and I worked there briefly.
if the tar is simply in the soil itself, wouldn't there naturally be a lot of seepage of bitumens into the groundwater of the area? I know people who had visited, and lived there before the projects started, and they claim that the smell and pools of tar formed on the surface back in those days.
When oil was discovered in Ontario, the story goes that a blanket hanging from a covered wagon was soaked in oil after a trip through the area where Petrolia is now. Oil does pool at or near the surface but the quantities are relatively small.
Tar sand operations remove the "overburden" which is typically 5 to 75 metres of soil, before another 40 to 60 metres of bitumen mixed with sand is found. Such material is well below the water table. For material near the surface, the natural oozing of bitumen out of the sand is very slow, though even small quantities have a smell.
In the extraction process, the bitumen mixed with sand is separated by a number of processes, including heating and injecting steam so that the bitumen will flow and I think they spin the slurry to separate the bitumen from the sand. The tailings water doesn't just have leftover bitumen, but contains naphtha and paraffin, which are used in the extraction process, and oil leftovers like benzene, naphthenic acid and polyaromatic hydrocarbon. The separated sand still contains some bitumen and when spread over the ground does not show signs of supporting life.
Albertans take great pride in their stupidity, though, so I'm not sure what can be done about it.
David said: Who cares, really? I wouldn't live there, so they can go ahead and sleep in their own shit.
Unfortunately, it doesn't stay put. I don't know the watersheds that well, but it looks like the two Alberta watersheds either drain north into the Arctic Sea, or east through southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
"Alberta Advantage." Ah-yep.
Noni
We can't just carry on like we did in the 50s,60s,70s,80,90,etc.
I can't even walk out my door without a gas mask and bubble suit to protect me from the madness of automobiles and drivers. This love affair with the automobile has pushed now pushed me past the boiling point.
This is one Lucille who thinks that the days of the fossil fueled automobile or slighly fossil fueled must come to an abrupt end. Americans kill each other and themselves 48,000 times a year. I long for a snow storm so that I can have some peace and quiet before the snowplows start up all those noisey engines are at it again.
Those big 3 auto companies asking for a bailout spend $25 Billion every 2.5 years just on advertising to get us to buy their wares.
Everyplace now is insane with traffic.
I parked my car and got an electric bike so that I will feel like less of a hypocrite.
OT: So the BTs look like they're getting busy cheering 18 Senate appointments. Somehow this is democratic. I think it is Harper's only chance at a "legacy" since he's not going to be in power much longer.
I figure he'll go to the GG to demand an election, and GG will say "good, the Liberal leader says he feels the same way."
I think the BT implosion will be fun to watch, no? They'll pine for the old days when Dion would mispronounce something and they could go an entire news cycle on that and drown out whatever his message was.
No more free ride for you!
Hahahahaha!
Here's the thing roblaw: saying it's bad over there as well when someone points to Alberta is like excusing them...
The CO2 stuff is important: never trust a rightwinger who claims to be greatly concerned about pollution but doesn't think global warming is a problem we need to worry about. It is a real big current problem, and we can and must work on reducing GHGs at the same time as we work on reducing pollution.
..not that it isn' a problem.. but is it "THE" problem HS? Spend some time, read he literature.. global warming..err.. climate change.. is a strongly supported "theory", and the results of that, if true, are even more speculative, some of which are actually positive potentially.. (increased productivity of land for feeding he world).. whereas, we can SEE pollution TODAY in our water resources.. that isn't THEORY, it's REALITY..
roblaw, I'm not sure what you're saying here, except that it's a godforsaken mess and someone's got to clean it up.
Personally I felt the Green Shift would have helped, but the Tories seemed determined to "tax pollution at the source" without a) explaining how much THAT was going to add to the consumer burden or b) actually, you know, taxing anything. Or doing anything at all, in fact, about pollution.
When it comes to philosophy and pollution, it's amazing how much "greed is good" correlated with "so's radioactive drinking water."
Oh, and the idea of global warming being good for raising food crops? That's just silly. Unless you think that the preferred item on the menus of the world is likely to be seaweed.
Not quite done: As to toxic tort legislation--that would be that thing where the oil company with the most lawyers always wins, right?
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