Good morning, and thank you very kindly.
It's a great pleasure to have the opportunity to meet with the committee this morning. I'm going to give you just a very brief background, and then I have made four recommendations in here based on my work in the oil sands for about 15 years, where I saw issues that needed to be addressed going forward.
My understanding is that I have something in the order of eight minutes, and I hope I won't take anywhere near that time to address some of these issues. Jim Barker and I are actually going to give a brief summary and then present ourselves for questioning. We have seen that you have been through a lot of testimony, and we expect you might have some points of clarification you feel we could assist you with.
I and a number of my colleagues have been working on the oil sands since about 1983. We have effectively worked in two areas of research, one that I'll call on-lease activity, that is, research done on the leases of the oil sands companies—predominantly Syncrude and Suncor, because those were the only two active companies out there when I started doing this type of work--and the other area of activity that we've undertaken is what I'll call off-lease activity, the activity of trying to look for effects in the environment in the Athabasca River.
The work we've been doing on the leases has really been directed toward two end-points. One of them is the environmental toxicology of the chemicals that are associated with the water used to extract bitumen from the oil sands. These are principally naphthenic acids, which I suspect you've heard about before, and alkylated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a class of compounds associated with all oils. We have also looked at issues around salinity, both sodium salinity and sulphate salinity, that occur when you effectively expose the oil sands to water and the salts leach out and end up in the processed water that's associated with extraction.
We've been doing this work on the leases for two reasons. One of them is basic toxicology, to try to determine the threshold concentrations of these chemicals that would be expected to cause an effect in aquatic organisms. Once you have that body of toxicology information, you can effectively start to set water quality standards, or PWQOs, provincial water quality standards in Alberta; or federal water quality guidelines, through CCME, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment. For naphthenates, there are no standards of that nature because the basic toxicology was never done.
So we're looking at understanding the toxicology of those compounds, should there ever be a requirement to effectively set standards for the release of waters into the Athabasca drainage.
The other reason we're trying to understand these compounds' toxicity has to do with the so-called end-pit lake strategy, where you effectively put tailings of some form into a mined out area, cap them with water, and hope that through time this will develop into a natural lake system. When I say “hope”, I mean there have been a number of scale-up demonstrations associated with this, but the only full-scale first attempt at an end-pit lake has yet to be initiated. It is going to be done by Syncrude Canada with their Base Mine Lake tailings pond. My understanding is that Suncor is in the planning stages to initiate their first end-pit lake within the next, I think, probably two to three years. Those are, technically speaking, demonstration activities.
The other area we have been looking at has to do with off-lease activity. We have been looking for impacts associated with oil sands-type materials in the Athabasca watershed. I had some references included in the work we've done looking at impacts on larval fish and impacts on reproductive activity in free-living fish in the Athabasca drainage area. We did most of that work prior to 2003. Really, what we're looking at there is whether we can demonstrate effects in the Athabasca watershed of oil sands-like materials. They may come from natural erosion of oil sands deposits in the area, or they may come from activity—although at the present time, I expect the majority of the effects we're seeing in the receiving environment may in fact be the result of naturally occurring oil sands. But no one has really looked at that to any great extent.
So those are the two areas of activity.
There are key concerns to be addressed. I had four issues that I think we need to be conscious of as a society as we move forward in looking at exploitation of these oil sands resources. As I stated above in my brief, there are chemical inputs into the river that occur naturally and there are inputs that can occur from industrial activity. We don't know what the relative contributions from each are. We don't know whether or not the system can accept any further loading of oil sands-type materials beyond what is naturally occurring. We really have no standards of how we would effectively allow any kind of a release from the system, should it occur. In some ways we really are not fully cognizant of what the potential cumulative impacts are of the various oil sands industries or the other municipal and industrial and agricultural uses of water in that watershed.
By the way, when I'm talking about impact in the system, I'm really talking at the present time about defining whether there are effects we can observe in the system now. That's one question. The second one, after you've established whether or not there are effects, is what's causing those effects. They may be naturally occurring. They may be as a result of anthropogenic activity. The first step is to take a look in the environment to a greater extent than we have done now.
The other area that I don't really think we have a fully integrated, sustainable management strategy for is water in the Athabasca drainage, in terms of surface water and groundwater and interaction. I'm going to let Jim speak to that to a greater extent.
At the present time we have not spent a lot of effort as a society looking at what I would call ecosystem and human health impacts of potential contaminants that are transported off the oil sands leases into the Athabasca drainage. There is no permitted surface water, effectively emissions, into that system at the present time. There are very likely a couple of groundwater inputs to the Athabasca River. We know very little about what I would call atmospheric transport and deposition associated with the potential contaminants. What we really need to be looking at are the potential impacts of that. Can we quantify them? Can ecosystem benchmarks and standards be developed that would allow us to look at the potential impacts that are there at the present time?
Remember, I want to get back to this first question. I'm not particularly worried at the present time about attributing blame in terms of who is responsible for what in terms of the impacts. Let's find out if there are effects first and then worry later about where they're coming from in terms of a risk analysis and division mechanism that would allow us to identify where they are coming from.
The last comment I will make has to do more with information availability and assimilation activity around all the data that's available in the oil sands. Integration of activity is a very large issue. Up until about five or six years ago, a relatively limited number of players were doing research in this arena. As the number of oil sands companies has increased, as the number of different monitoring programs has increased, at the present time the total impact of the work fails from an inability to integrate all that information and pull it together to be able to make a decision framework type of exercise. You have the northern river basins study that provided data. The Panel on Energy Research and Development, PERD, produces this information and funds research. CEMA produces research. RAMP produces research. CONRAD produces research. There is a certain degree of overlap among the activities they undertake, but often information is available to one group that would be of very great use to the others. But the mechanisms for moving that forward and trying to integrate that are at the present time relatively difficult.
I've been working there for 15 years with a number of different partners and I have difficulty pulling data together from some of these different areas when I actually know what data I'm looking for. If you're in a situation where you don't have that body of experience and you literally don't know the one person to call who has that information, it becomes a much more difficult exercise.
I'm going to stop at this point and then pass it on to Jim Barker, who will talk a bit about oil sands and then some further issues around disintegration. I don't know whether you'd like both of us to speak and then go to questions or....