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Nipigon Bay
Image © Used under Creative Commons licence (BY: http://www.flickr.com/photos/er1danus/1016368/ NODERIV, NON-COMMERCIAL)
Tar Sands is history’s largest Gold Rush with workers, companies and tax-collectors swarming to Alberta to fight for a portion of the bitumen bounty. In 2006 one company, Suncor, made profits of £1.6 billion[19], long before oil prices reached their record peak of nearly US$150 a barrel in the summer of 2008. Whilst the profits roll in, the environmental cost rises. The negative impacts of the tar sands mining are frightening, ranging from wide-scale mutilation of the landscape and complete destruction of biodiversity to trampling on the rights of indigenous peoples, and poisoning of local populations near-bye and across Canada. Nonetheless the industry and, startlingly, the Albertan and Canadian Governments, have paid little more than lip service to cleaning up the tar sands, neglecting even to fully monitor the problem, and showing scarce to no interest in curtailing it [3].
Toxic water, toxic air
The extraction and processing of tar sands requires vast quantities of water, with four litres of water required to produce one litre of oil[18,24]. Water is drawn directly from the Athabasca river, altering its flow patterns, and waste water is then poured into ‘tailing ponds.’ These vast lakes contain pollutants so highly toxic that some operators have had to employ people to scrape dead birds from the surface of the ponds[3,24]. Already over 50km2 in area and growing, are so large that they can be seen from space. Some of these lakes are held back by some of the largest dams on earth [3] – others are poorly sealed allowing dangerous chemicals to escape through the ground and into the environment [24]. Monitoring of the problem has been erratic but one company admitted that as much as 1600m3 of polluted water leeks into the Athabasca River every day[3]. In the summer the heat of the sun releases volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the atmosphere[3,24]. 70% of the sulphur emissions from processing is transported into the neighbouring Saskatchewan Province, leading to acid rain[2]. Air pollution in various forms around mining sites already exceeds recommended Government limits, but tar-sands development has been allowed to continue regardless[3].
Tar-sands operation has been linked with elevated levels of mercury, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and volatile organic compounds[3]. Levels of dissolved arsenic have been measured at five times normal levels for the region, and arsenic levels in moose meat has been measured at 453 times healthy levels[3]. Laughably, the Alberta Government responded to this claim by issuing an assuring that levels of arsenic are “only” 17 to 33 times acceptable levels[3].
Image © Jiri Rezac / WWF-UK
Mutated fish, poisoned food, and unusual diseases
You don’t have to look hard to find hard evidence of the effects that these chemicals have in the environment. Pollution in the region has affected the indigenous First Nation inhabitants and residents of the large towns, who have both seen their health hit by the tar sands. Various species of fish and game have been found with strange deformities, and there are reports from doctors in the area of unusually high levels of uncommon cancers including bile duct cancers, colon cancers, lymphomas, thyroid cancers, and leukaemia [3]. The wide-scale removal of forest for mining and related infrastructure has decimated biodiversity, destroying habitats of animals such as Caribou reindeer, moose, bears, wolves, and some five million migratory birds[6]. First Nation peoples, angry at the poisoning of their food and water supplies and having received little more than token gestures from the Alberta Government, have begun to campaign against the tar sands. One group, the Beaver Lake Creek Nation, with the backing of the Co-operative Bank, is challenging tar sands in the courts[8,15].
“Animals are dying, disappearing, and being mutated by the poisons dumped into our river systems. Once we have destroyed these fragile eco-systems we will have also destroyed our peoples and trampled our treaty rights.”
Canadian Indigenous Environmental Network
An overflowing problem
The watershed of the Athabasca river covers 1/6th of Canada, and so toxins that escape into the environment affect people many hundreds of kilometres downstream. Furthermore, the massive increases in output, and construction of new refining plants in the South of the Alberta, Eastern Canada, and into the United States is spreading the problem further throughout the North American continent. Wherever tar-sands are transported, their pollution goes with them.
The huge quantities of energy which tar sands mining and processing requires is creating another problem. By 2012 tar-sands could use as much gas as heating all the homes in Canada[14]), using up one relatively clean fuel for the sake of extracting another highly dirty fuel. The vast emissions from tar sands, as well as being a massive contribution to greenhouse gas emissions could ironically lead to fuel shortages in Canada. Tar sands are stripping Canada of the flexibility to sustainably manage its fuel consumption. At the same time, the increasing importance of this volatile export to the Canadian economy could lead to many of the problems associated with the resource curse[16].
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