Environment Committee on May 12th, 2009

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Okay. I asked because I'm trying to reconcile the idea of 90% recycled water per barrel with the idea it could take up to four barrels of fresh draw on that. I'm doing the math at 1,000 barrels, and then the second thousand and the third thousand barrels, and I'm not quite getting the same calculation. I'm not a great mathematician, but I just wanted to know.

Where do those numbers come from, by the way? Sometimes statistics just get quoted and after a while become truth themselves and people forget where they came from.

[Dr. Selma Guigard]

They're from the National Energy Board.

Also, if you go back to the sustainability reports for each of the oil sands developers, such as Shell, Syncrude, and Suncor, you can actually calculate that number.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Returning to reclamation for just a moment here, are we on the verge of significantly increasing the pace of reclamation? We're beginning to assess the first major reclamation project and the first tailings pond is about to be reclaimed. How many decades was that pond in use before it was reclaimed?

What can you anticipate the future pace being? Is the next three- to five-year window going to see significant progress in that direction? How many years will it take from the opening of a new tailings pond to reclamation? Are we about to improve on that pace or not? Will it be significant, in your estimation, or is it still going to be a long-term process?

[Dr. Selma Guigard]

There was recently a directive put out by the Alberta government to try to give a bit of a regulatory push to speed up reclamation of tailings ponds. My personal opinion is there's still a lot of work to be done on the research side, in terms of reclaiming those tailings ponds. And again, it depends how we see those tailings ponds being reclaimed. Is it an end-pit lake? Is it a return to muskeg forest? What does that reclamation look like?

So there has been a little bit of a regulatory push from the Alberta government, but how that is going to translate, I'm not sure.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Okay.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Good. Thank you very much, Mr. Watson.

Thank you so much for your presentations. They were a great way to kick off our hearings here. I think we clarified a lot of things in our minds about the technological aspects.

I wish you continued success and good work. Thanks again.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

We are a bit pressed for time, so I would ask that we resume now.

We have with us for our second segment Mary Griffiths; Dr. David Schindler, from the University of Alberta; and William Donahue, an independent researcher in limnology and biochemistry.

Each witness will have ten minutes to present, and then we'll move on to questioning, as we normally do.

Dr. Donahue, I'm told that you'll be starting. So without further ado, please go ahead.

[William F. Donahue, Independent Researcher, Limology and Biogeochemistry, As an Individual]

What I'm going to do is talk about the changing water supply in the Athabasca River, focusing on the entire basin, and general implications in terms of what that might mean for water-intensive development.

I think I'll start with a basic summary of what science is. I don't know if anyone has talked to you about what science is, but according to some, science consists of formulation and testing of hypotheses based on observational evidence. In this, experiments are important or applicable, but their function is to verify observation and impose controlled conditions. According to Richard Feynman, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist and popular writer, science alone, of all subjects, contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallability of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation.

As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. I'd qualify that by saying it's the belief of experts in the ignorance of experts.

Generally, I would say that I would describe science as the systematic observation of natural events and conditions in order to discover facts about them and from which explanations for them are formulated, subsequently asking and attempting to answer directed critical questions that are inspired by evident disagreement between observed fact and the explanations we have previously formulated. In other words, science is a process by which we learn, and it involves constant attempts to disprove what we think we know, by asking critical questions and rationally seeking their answers.

The next slide is “What is not science?” What is not science is anything that doesn't involve the collection of data and the attempt to formulate general explanations for them or the subsequent testing of such prior explanations via further observation and hypothesis-forming. Alternatively, what is not science is anything that has been shown scientifically to be incorrect and yet it's still presented as conclusive. The second aspect, I would say, is what we see a lot of in what we're talking about today in terms of environmental science.

Now on to some other topics.

This is table 1 in the submission I gave you. Basically what it shows is changes in temperature and precipitation for northern Alberta. Much of this was presented in part in a paper Dr. Schindler and I published in 2006. The general message is that in the majority of centres in northern Alberta, as well as much of the western prairie provinces, there have been fairly substantial increases in temperature since about 1970. I looked at 1970 for a number of reasons, which I explain in the submission.

Generally, the pattern is significant increases in temperature, significant declines in total precipitation, and generally either no change in rain or decreases, depending on where you are. If you're interested in water supply, certainly increased temperatures and declining precipitation are critical in that.

The next slide is changes in winter snowpack in northern Alberta. Again, these patterns are evident across the prairies. We live in the rain shadow of the Rockies here in Alberta, and ultimately a lot of our water supply comes from snowpack in the spring, and we rely upon a lot of that. As you can see here, what's in red shows changes in the number of days per year in which there's snow on the ground and changes in the absolute depth of snowpack at its maximum. The general trend, again, is that the majority of places have shown, since 1970, a significant decline in the length of time during the winter in which snow is on the ground and the total depth of the snowpack. Again, if you're relying on winter snowpack for a lot of spring melt water and all of the pulse-oriented, ecological processes that occur in a river with declining snowpack, you can expect fairly substantial ecological effects in surface waters.

What I show here is total summer flow in the Athabasca River at Fort McMurray. This is figure 1 in the submission.

In general, as you can see, there is a fair amount of variation from year to year, but ultimately the trend since about 1970 is a fairly significant decline. 1998 was a pretty wet year across the prairies. Ultimately, from year to year, you don't really know whether there's going to be quite a bit of water or very little water, but as I said, the trend is generally downwards. And this consideration of long-term trends is probably the first thing you should attempt to use in order to inform some kind of plan that is dependent on water supply.

Ms. Griffiths is going to be talking about the Cold Lake area and groundwater, and I just thought I'd toss this one on. This isn't in my submission, but this is the Beaver River near Cold Lake. It's the major river in that part of the world and it's a basin that's independent to itself in east central Alberta.

As you can see again, there's substantial variation from year to year in terms of total flow in the Beaver River, but ultimately in the last 40 to 50 years the decline has been pretty substantial. And you can see this a lot in the lakes and other surface waters in that area. A lot of lakes in that area are down substantially.

Another thing I presented in my submission was what's happening in the Athabasca basin on a sub-basin level? What I did, and I explained this in the submission, is took a bunch of monitoring points on the Athabasca River and looked at the changes in water flow between those points: What is added? How is the flow different at a downstream point from an upstream point? This is with the assumption that this change in water is the water that's added from the basin between those points.

As you can see, if you head up into the Sunwapta River, which is the tributary of the Athabasca that drains some of the glaciers in the Rockies, since the early seventies up until the mid-nineties there was actually an increase in the amount of water coming off the catchment. This is because of increases in glacial melt.

As you move downstream to Jasper, the flow hasn't really changed much. The farther downstream into the basin and away from the mountains you get, the greater the decline in the amount of water coming off the basin. For those of you who aren't really aware of the geography of the Athabasca basin, Hinton is about 80 kilometres east of Jasper, just outside the mountains in the foothills of the Athabasca basin. The basin that's downstream of Hinton comprises 94% of the total area of the basin.

What this analysis shows is that in all points between Hinton and Fort McMurray, the amount of water coming off the basin into the river has declined by about 50% since the early 1970s up until 2001 to 2005.

What I've given you now is a picture of where things have been and how things have been changing in terms of climate change and water supply. Looking to the future, out of the University of Victoria there are some climate change projects there. They have created one of the main models for the global circulation models that predict future changes in temperature for much of Canada. What I did here was summarize the output of ten regional models for the western prairie provinces. This shows you the degree of temperature change that is anticipated as a result of one of these models. As you can see, it's anticipated that in the 21st century, the temperature for the western prairie provinces is going to increase, on average, 6.5 degrees.

In the next diagram I've shown you what this means in terms of changes in climate. That's approximately the same as the difference in climate between Calgary and Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories. So what we could expect, if we realize that degree of temperature change, is that the climate in Calgary moves north to Fort Smith.

What does that mean in terms of water supply? I did some modelling. I haven't included many of the details, but I created some models that predicted river flow and water yield, based solely on climate variables, things like temperature, snowpack, evaporation. In that way I remove a lot of the other information that other modellers need that is much more detailed, simply because there's an abject lack of data when it comes to this sort of thing, in terms of hydro-geological information, sediment types, ground cover, detailed evaporation measurements. Much of the water modelling that's out there is being produced as a result of intensive research on a very small scale, catchments that are of the order of less than a hectare in size. So trying to scale those results up to an area that's tens of thousands of kilometres square is impossible at this time.

Based on my models, I looked at a series of catchments in northeastern Alberta that ranged from about 300 square kilometres to 30,000 square kilometres. In trying to replicate what's happened in the past in terms of water flow, the model predicts about 75% of the variation in historical data, so it's fairly accurate in terms of replicating what's happened in the past.

I then tweaked the model to basically put forward scenarios of increases of three degrees and six degrees centigrade and looked at how that would conceivably affect water supply. In the blue, you see changes that are predicted as a result of a three-degree centigrade increase, and in the red, changes as a result of a six-degree centigrade increase.

On average, with a three-degree centigrade increase--and this encompasses all the years and all the catchments--the model suggests an anticipated 15% decline in the amount of water coming off these basins of this area of northeastern Alberta between April and October.

For a six-degree increase, the average was 39%. The numbers below each of the bars represent the worst case, the worst year, of the data that I used for each of the basins. There are going to be wet years and there are going to be dry years, just as there have been in the past. However, it's the really dry years that likely will concern most people. The numbers below each bar represent the worst-case scenario in terms of dry years for the three- and six-degree centigrade changes.

As you can see, it ranged from percentages in the high 30s to about 70%, depending on the basin, for the three-degree increase. For the six-degree increase, in dry years it was very, very bad, ranging from 50% to 100% on the basin. For the most part, it's in the range of a 60-70% decline.

If you're not looking at changing trends in water in the past when you formulate your management plans in terms of what you're going to rely on for water and what kind of buildup you're going to do that's heavily water-reliant, and you're not going to consider the possibility in the future that climate change is going to seriously affect the amount of water in that part of the world, then you stand the risk of running into some pretty catastrophic effects economically as a result of potentially catastrophic effects of climate change ecologically.

I'm on the next slide. I talked a little bit in my presentation about the lower Athabasca River management framework. There are three stages: green, yellow, and red. The message I wanted to convey was that the framework, as it is now, isn't based on any kind of observational science. It ignores the past trends. It basically ranks all of the historical flow from highest to lowest and then looks at the changes in that trend itself. It doesn't look at how it's changing over time, and it makes some assumptions that if you get a dramatic change in the ranked flow, that represents some sort of ecological effect.

Basically what they've done is design a model that more accurately reflects the geometry of the bed of the river than anything else. It ignores all sorts of ecological processes that are dependent on flow, such as the periodic reflooding of suspended wetlands in the basin, sediment transport, scouring, effects on fisheries, and that sort of thing. They've arbitrarily decided that 90% of the time, there will be no ecological effect and no need to limit flow extractions; about 5% of the time, they'll have to do some moderate extraction limits; and 5% of the time, historically, there would be more serious extraction limits under the right conditions.

I'm now on the next slide.

I included these figures in my report. The upper figure is basically the trends in the September flows of the Athabasca. This is to illustrate where they've gone. It's variable, but since about 1970, there's been a downward trend, as I showed. In the bottom slide, you can see that I've ranked them all. Under the framework, there'd be an arbitrary conclusion that 5% of the time it's in the red, 5% of the time it's in the yellow, and the rest of the time it's green. Green represents fine ecological conditions.

This ignores the fact that 50% of the last ten years would have been either in yellow or in red. If we're looking to the future in changing water supply, if water supply goes down, the frequency of yellow and red conditions will dramatically increase.

A paper in press from the University of Alberta argues that if the current water management framework had been in place in 2000, the Athabasca river flows would have been in yellow or red condition for up to 40 weeks per year and in the red for at least 20 weeks per year.

If climate change causes a 10% decline in flow, it's going to result in a substantial increase in binding flow conditions for the oil industry. I would suggest that this 10% figure is fairly conservative and conceivably a best-case scenario, since we're looking at a 50% decline coming off the basin downstream in the last 30 years, and since expected growth in the oil sands extraction is projected to go up to 2.3 million barrels per day by 2020. This means one of three things: they're going to have to find some substantial off-stream storage representing approximately 15% of the total annual water supply; they're going to have to reduce the amount of water they pull out of the river by about 50% below currently permitted levels; or they're going to have to find a way to reduce water use to less than 0.2 cubic metres per barrel of oil, which is substantially less than what they're currently using.

Basically, my message is that we're on a collision course between declining water supply and rapidly ramping up water consumption demands. Dave Sauchyn and some others at the University of Regina did some modelling of climate for the prairie provinces. In the northeastern part of Alberta, they're predicting a change from moist sub-humid to dry sub-humid or even semi-arid conditions. The amount of precipitation between northern and southern Alberta is now approximately the same and has been for the last 30 or 40 years. The difference is that the south is a lot warmer and that net water balance means there's less free water and it's much more arid. In the Palliser's Triangle in southeastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan, if we get increased evaporation and increased temperature in the north, there's going to be less free water, and that means much less surface available for ecological and industrial use.

That's the end of my presentation.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you, Dr. Donahue.

Dr. Schindler.

[Dr. David Schindler, Professor of Ecology, University of Alberta, As an Individual]

I'm going to show you some photos and maps to illustrate the material that's in the briefs you have. I explain there the reason for our study.

This is a natural seep of oil sands, of which there are several along the Athabasca River. Of course, industry's position has been that all of the pollutants in the river come from such natural seeps. To me, as someone who works with watersheds and waters all the time, it's inconceivable that going from a footprint like that in 1974 to that on the same scale in 2008 would not cause a lot of chemical releases from the watershed to the river. We undertook to study that.

I pointed out in my brief the deficiencies of the regional aquatic monitoring program. What we did instead was to take 18 sites up and down the Athabasca River, from above Fort McMurray to the end of the river, and then a few, as you'll see, around Fort Chipewyan, and superimpose them on a geological map. The white area in the centre is the McMurray formation that is the focus of much of the oil sands activity. We also went to every major tributary in that stretch and sampled above the McMurray formation, in the McMurray formation but above oil sands mining, and at the river mouth below any activity. We had a few reference streams and a half dozen streams that ran through mined areas.

I'll just go through these in order to show you a general pattern. These are in the brief.

The black bars are winter flows, and the white bars are summer flows. In general, on this and subsequent slides, you'll see that there really is not much evidence of an oil sands effect during the wintertime. As you go from the Fort McMurray end at the bottom to the Fort Chipewyan end at the top, the little side panels represent the various tributaries. However, if you look at the summer panels, during the period that the river is ice-free you'll see a considerable effect, in this case, on dissolved polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. We chose to study this group of compounds because it contained several known carcinogens that we know are high in bitumen and were also high in previous studies, such as the Exxon Valdez spill and the notorious Wabamun Lake spill. I'm going to flick through these fairly quickly, but look for that consistency in pattern.

Aluminum is not necessarily such a toxic metal, but as you'll see by the red lines, there are some Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment guidelines that are exceeded in most of these samples. Again you'll see the levels pick up greatly going downstream, as you get into the oil sands area in summer, not in winter.

Arsenic has much the same pattern, with again about a doubling downstream of the mines during the summertime. For lead, again, a number of the summer values there exceed CCME guidelines. As for mercury, again you can see very little in the winter, but note the increase as you get into and beyond the oil sands during the summer.

Uranium is one about which there has been a fair amount of concern. In this case, you really see no influence of the oil sands either winter or summer. The pattern is pretty consistent, indicating that most of the source is upstream.

It's the same for cadmium. Note that cadmium, especially in summer, exceeds CCME guidelines by a considerable amount, but again, there's no clear evidence in this case of a contribution from the oil sands.

The reason for that winter to summer difference is that the river is encased in ice for about four months--and this winter for practically five months--during the winter season. So things entering tend to accumulate on the ice.

There has been a considerable amount of airborne input, which surprised us. This is a snow layer on the Muskeg River. It isn't the worst one we've seen, but you can see the black layers and the black surface on this snow as a result of airborne contamination.

At each of these sites, the same sites as shown in our earliest slide, we took a sample of the total snowpack, melted it down, and then filtered 900 millilitres of each snowpack. These filters were all white when we started. They're very fine--they have about half-micron pores. The yellow numbers are distances between the sites. In this case, Fort McMurray is at the left, going downstream to Fort Chipewyan on the right, and the little side legs are the six major tributaries. So you can see, visually even, a high contribution of suspended particulates in snow in the area for a considerable distance around the tar sands plants, but note tailing off quite a bit downstream.

In the next several panels, again, this is total PAH. In this case, we did a polycyclic aromatic analysis of both the filters, which you saw, and the filtered material, the dissolved portion. The dissolved portion is in red. The particulate portion on the filter is in black. The total concentration is represented by the end of the bar. Again, you can see this big contribution of airbornes in the vicinity of the tar sands and tailing off going downstream, with Fort Chipewyan at the top, and of course almost nothing upstream of Fort McMurray at the bottom.

Again, there is a very similar pattern for aluminum, except that more is in particulate form.

For arsenic, you see the same pattern. It is clearly an airborne contribution from the tar sands mining. Lead has much the same pattern.

All of these, again, show the CCME guidelines.

For mercury, there is a big contribution of mercury via airbornes, largely in the particulate fraction. Note that these values are very low. They're in parts per trillion. But this isn't where mercury is a problem. It biomagnifies up food chains up to a million-fold. Concentrations as high as these have been shown to result in serious contamination problems in other systems. Again, it indicates that there is some mercury coming from upstream, but a big contribution is from the mining to the airborne mercury loads to the snowpack.

Cadmium doesn't show any contribution. The one contribution it shows is just below the outfall for Fort McMurray, and it may represent some sort of urban influence. Cadmium, of course, is in various parts of automobiles, and so on. So that isn't too surprising. Again, note that most of these values are at or above CCME guidelines for cadmium in parts per billion.

There is accumulating evidence that the concentrations of polycyclic aromatics, particularly in their alkaloidal forms, which are very common in this river, are causing deformities in fish. I've given you two references. I could have given you a dozen. There is clear evidence of deformities in eggs and embryos in contact, particularly, with the particulate forms of PAH right at the sediment surface, which of course is where eggs are laid. This is a government study under the northern river ecosystem initiative, with some actual pictures of deformities.

The study also indicates that there were deformities in the Athabasca formation upstream of the mines, but that the incidences increased downstream of the mines, indicating that these particulate inputs from the mines are having an influence—up to 95% embryonic mortalities and a high incidence of deformities in the embryos that survived. The CCME has this covered with its interim sediment quality guidelines. But this same study indicates that both the regional aquatics monitoring program and the Peace-Athabasca Delta program, in measuring the same compounds, found fairly high incidences in which the CCME interim sediment quality guidelines were exceeded.

The big concern that I'm sure you heard yesterday in Fort Chipewyan is that some of the cancer rates noted in the community are attributed to some of the compounds, which are at least in part the result of mining activity.

We have found big northern pikes loaded with mercury. I don't think the water should be the sole focus of this program. If you look at all of the problems associated with the oil sands, this is clearly a black star program. You've heard a lot about in situ, and I think in situ has some big implications for water. It's already been shown to have big implications for wildlife. The northwest corner of Fort McMurray will be developed by Opti-Nexen, and this is the sort of developmental intensity that will be a part of these in situ things. High density of well pads and interconnecting roads and pipelines are very inhospitable to wildlife. Almost the whole corridor is alienated. But it's also big enough to vastly affect supplies of freshwater, both surface water and groundwater.

Of more concern than the average flow, in my opinion, is the winter low flows in the Athabasca. Industry is fond of saying that they use only 2% of the average flow of the Athabasca. That's an irrelevant factoid. We know there's lots of water in the Athabasca in summer. In winter, the flows are very low and decline very rapidly, and this is probably the most sensitive point in the river. At this point, industry uses 7% or 8% of the Athabasca's flow. The flows are declining and industry is increasing. You can see where all this is headed.

That's the end of my presentation.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you, Dr. Schindler.

Dr. Mary Griffiths.

[Dr. Mary Griffiths, As an Individual]

Yes, that's right.

I'll start straightaway. I appreciate the opportunity to present to the committee, and I am speaking today in a personal capacity.

I would like to start with my key messages. You know that the Athabasca is required to produce a lot of water for the oil sands, but I want to look at not only the Athabasca but also the influence of the oil sands development on groundwater quantity and quality. I think we're going to see a lot more impacts in the future with the cumulative effects of many projects. We're not really seeing yet the effects that we can expect in the future, so my real message is that we need a lot more information and a process to implement sound science to ensure that we do have sustainable management of groundwater resources.

We can see what's happening in the river. We're getting a lot of warnings. There's a lot of research on the river, but my concern is perhaps more with the groundwater, which is out of sight, and that tends to be more out of mind.

By way of background, I think sometimes it is useful to have absolute figures so you'll know what we're talking about. We know that the water allocated from the Athabasca River basin for the oil sands mining is by far the largest quantity: 550 million cubic metres were allocated by the end of 2007. The allocations already exceed current use, because a lot of projects have got their allocations but they're not yet operating, so therefore we're not yet seeing the impacts on the environment. In 2007 the volume of water actually being used was only roughly 130 million cubic metres, and of that about three-quarters came from the Athabasca River, surface runoff of over 20%, and non-saline groundwater 5%. This is for the mining operations. So you see, it's not just the Athabasca River that is providing water.

I think it's useful to have a comparison to get an idea of what 129 million cubic metres of water is like. The City of Edmonton, which supplies a population of about one million people, including the people around the city, treats every year about 130 million cubic metres, roughly what is being used in 2007 for the oil sands mining. But with the city, the water goes to the waste treatment plant, and only about 10% or less is actually consumed; the rest eventually flows back to the river. Of course that's not the case with the oil sands mining, because all the water is consumed. It actually gets put into a tailings pond; it does not flow back to the river, so it affects the river flow.

Now to the water used for in situ operations. David showed a slide just now to give the impression of how in the future it's going to have a huge impact, because you'll realize that 80% of the bitumen will be coming from in situ operations, not from the mining operations. In fact, more than 90% of the bitumen area is too deep to mine, and we'll be getting a lot of the bitumen in the future in particular from the in situ operations.

In 2007, total water use for the in situ was far less than the mining. The mining, if you remember, was 129 million cubic metres; in situ it's 31 million cubic metres, and half of that was saline groundwater. You might think we don't need to worry so much about saline groundwater, but of course it doesn't get replenished so rapidly, so I think the companies are going to be very concerned on the availability of the saline groundwater. But of course from the public perspective it's the shallow, non-saline groundwater that's of more concern. In 2007, nine million cubic metres of non-saline groundwater was already being used for in situ operations. To put that in perspective, more groundwater was being used for in situ operations than for oil sands mining even in 2007, and even though we are still only at the early stages of bitumen production. Eventually far more will come from in situ, but in 2007 only 40% was coming from in situ and 60% of the bitumen was coming from mining.

So what will be the impacts on the groundwater quantity as a result of the mining operations? The drawdown of groundwater for in situ projects lasts for the length of a project, and that can be several decades. It will affect both the shallow non-saline aquifers and the deeper saline water. Some projects have used saline water, some use non-saline groundwater, some use surface water, and some use a mixture, but the groundwater recharge is very slow. Groundwater can move very slowly, perhaps one to 35 metres a year, or up to perhaps 130 metres a year in a buried channel aquifer, which we'll see later.

The groundwater recharge can be affected by the drainage of wetlands. We've already seen a lot of that from the mining operations. It can be affected by use of surface water and surface water flows. Of course, groundwater and rivers are very closely interlinked. If you reduce groundwater, it can affect the volume of water in the river.

I think the main problem would be the cumulative impact of so many overlapping projects. When a company does an environmental impact assessment, it looks at its immediate neighbours and sees what impacts their own development will have on the companies immediately around. But there's no regional modelling to see what the overall cumulative impacts will be of a lot of development, and the use of water in one area can affect the recharge for another area. Then of course climate change will also affect the groundwater precipitation and groundwater recharge.

So we need a lot more information about the aquifers in the in situ areas, to provide basic background data. We don't have a lot of good density of data for a long period of time. We need a lot more monitoring and we need surface and groundwater monitoring models, the interrelationship between surface water and groundwater. We also need to remember that in this region we don't just have what I call horizontal aquifers. The aquifers are interspersed with buried channels and the geology is much more complicated than one would be led to believe by the surface topography because of these glacial meltwater channels, which are filled with sand or till and are not evident on the surface.

The next slide just shows briefly the area north of Fort McMurray. Fort McMurray is where the blue comes to the bottom at the centre there. This is an area of about 130 kilometres by about 145 kilometres. It does not show the area of Cold Lake, which is farther south. But even within this area we've got roughly 20 buried channels, and certainly in the area farther south the Alberta Geological Survey thinks we will still find more buried channels.

In the interests of brevity I will not go on further about that now, but I'd be happy to answer more questions about that.

I would like just to mention that there are not only considerable concerns about the impacts on groundwater quantity, but also on groundwater quality. We already know about the release of some oil sands mining operations, and there's the potential and actual leakage of contaminated water from tailings ponds. But within the in situ operations, we have the heating of aquifers that has led in several cases to well blowouts, casings failures, and steam releases. In the Cold Lake area, where they use not SAGD but cyclical steam stimulation, the temperatures are much higher. It releases arsenic, which is naturally occurring in the formation, and then one tends to get an arsenic plume moving down away from the heated area. So there are impacts on groundwater quality.

Of course it's great that we're doing a lot of water recycling to reduce the use freshwater. If one is using saline water and it's going to be used to make steam, it has to be treated before it can be used, and when one recycles water, again, the water has to be treated before it can be used and the waste products of the treatment have either to be sent to landfill or to deep well disposal. So the handling of those wastes also creates further problems.

Finally, in the interest of brevity, I will just sum up to say that we expect the scale of operations to increase. In the latest predictions in the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers they're still looking for perhaps three million barrels of bitumen a day by 2020. That's more than two and a half times what was produced last year. We're going to see a lot more cumulative impacts in the mining areas and even greater in the long term in the in situ, and the expansion could also extend right down to the Edmonton area if as many upgraders go ahead as originally planned. We could also see a lot of water being used from the North Saskatchewan River, which is the river that supplies Edmonton.

So we need to minimize water use for all oil sands operations. We need to improve the monitoring of all water quantity and water quality, and we need much more research to increase our understanding of the cumulative impact, including the surface and groundwater interactions. I do believe there is a role for the federal government in this work.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much, Dr. Griffiths.

I would now like to go to questions, the seven-minute round, beginning with Mr. Trudeau.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

Thank you. I'd like to get right into it.

Dr. Donahue, you spoke about the water management framework. The way you framed it at first was saying that it's only based on the geology and geometry of the rivers and not really taking much into account. Then you went on to say that even with that level of limitations in terms of understanding what it is, we're still in some real trouble with those links to it. Is it worth it, then, to try to improve the framework to understand some of the data you've brought in if it's only going to show us to a greater extent that we're in even greater trouble? What are the next steps on there?

[William F. Donahue]

My comments were in terms of the framework, and what it appeared to be based on, and ultimately the implications. My point in saying that we're in trouble was to go back to what is science. The basic assumption of the water framework, when they put it together, was that the amount of water isn't changing in the river, historically. The assumption will be that it won't change in the future. On average, 5% of the time we can expect this limitation or that limitation. My point is that simply by saying what years were the lowest flows, and where are we, and what would that mean in terms of trends.... So a very simple consideration of which years were the lowest flows and which were the highs, to contextualize that ranking of the flows, pretty much skewers the framework as it is.

So my critique on that one was because we've been spending no time or money on figuring out the state of a water resource upon which we are entirely dependent for this activity, we're now stuck with very little knowledge of what's happened, what's going to happen, and what the implications are.

My basic message was that the framework as it is now really isn't of a lot of use. It's very arbitrary. In terms of where we're going, certainly there's a great need for getting sufficient information to produce what I would consider a valid water management framework. We can't go forward in terms of managing the water or development in the basin that's dependent on water if we don't know what the effects are going to be.

I know the Alberta government has come up with an in-stream flow needs water management basin framework technique for southern Alberta and the South Saskatchewan River basin. It involved detailed sampling, detailed studies of things like the effects of flow on riparian communities, effects of flow on fisheries. Ultimately, though, what you need is to determine where the ecological thresholds are. As flow declines, at some point you can expect an ecological effect on whatever it is you're looking at, whether it's the suspended wetlands and lakes that are in the basin.... Periodic flooding of the river results in a recharge of these systems that keeps all of these vast wetlands healthy. At what point, as time goes on, does the river no longer exceed its banks in sufficient frequency to affect those things? At what point in the flow do fisheries start to collapse because of loss of habitat or loss of spawning, that sort of thing? At what point are the hydro-dynamics of the river in terms of sediment changes affected so that you're not getting the channelization and all the other things that are necessary for ecological function in the river?

The framework as it is considers none of that, simply because we have none of that information. My basic point was if we want to create a picture of what's going on in the river that is based on an understanding of what's happening in the river, what's most sensitive in the river, if we don't have that picture, we can't possibly hope to manage the river properly.

In one of the previous questions from the presenters before was something along the lines of, with $120 billion in development planned, and the industry contributing tens of millions of dollars to research, the amount of money being contributed to what I would call valid environmental research is a drop in the bucket of what's going into the industrial research. Provincially, we've seen water sampling for lakes in Alberta get cut 70% or 80% just in the last few weeks. If you're looking at trying to figure out what's going on with a resource that forms a foundation of a $100-billion-plus industry, you'd better start putting some serious thought and money into it.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

You're saying it was done in the southern regions, but it hasn't been done around the oil sands area.

[William F. Donahue]

Yes, and that's simply because I think a lot of it was out of sight, out of mind. The presumption is there's a lot of water in the north, it's water-rich; therefore, we don't really need to address it all that much.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

Thank you.

Dr. Schindler, yesterday afternoon we had presentations from various leaders and elders in the Fort Chipewyan area, and they brought up a number of anecdotal examples of fish deformities and concerns around that. Obviously your charts with the parts per billion and parts per trillion indicate the impacts of the magnification of those effects that go up the food chain.

I know you mentioned the larval examples of contamination and bitumen. I'm just wondering about the transition between what the native wisdom is telling us anecdotally around deformations and concretely in Lake Athabasca.

[Dr. David Schindler]

We did take fish samples as part of the study and we're analysing them as we speak. I don't have any results back yet, except to know that some of the fish are very, very high in mercury, and we're looking to see if they've increased over previous studies.

We have archived samples of fish and also mercury analyses that have gone back for almost 20 years now. In a couple of months we should know the answer to that.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Ouellet, please.

I would remind those in attendance that there are interpreters and there are devices available at the back if you need them for the interpretation from one language to another.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

You better use it, because I'm dangerous. I'm going to speak French.

Are you following me in French?

First, Dr. Griffiths, I would like to ask you something. At the end of your presentation, you say that the federal government's role is important—

[Dr. Mary Griffiths]

I was not going to go into the federal role in detail because I know that somebody else tomorrow is going to be speaking to that. I think there is a role through the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. As well, of course, there's a trigger with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on water quality. There is also sometimes an opportunity for the toxic substances with the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, as well as, of course, for the federal role for the first nations people and transboundary waters.

There are a lot of ways in which the federal government can get involved. What interests me the most is the work that has been done by Natural Resources Canada, and a Dr. Alfonso Rivera, in groundwater aquifer monitoring. There have been a number of aquifers monitored across Canada. There's a plan to do about 30 of them. One of them that has been identified is within the Athabasca oil sands region, but that has not yet been tackled.

I would hope that perhaps there will be an opportunity for the federal government to work probably with the Alberta Geological Survey. The Alberta Geological Survey has been doing some great work as well, but they are also limited in their resources. There is so much work that needs to be done. If we could get additional resources for monitoring and learning more about our groundwater aquifers in the oil sands region—not just in the Athabasca area but also in the Peace River and the Cold Lake area—I think this would be really valuable.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Thank you very much.

So that means that, in your opinion, the federal government has an important role to play in research. It must determine how we should behave with water.

[Dr. Mary Griffiths]

I think the research will help us to make better decisions. At the moment, I don't think we have enough information on the cumulative impacts. More projects are approved, but we don't know enough about the cumulative impact of so many projects going ahead, especially on groundwater. There was a plan by some companies working on in situ operations south of Fort McMurray to develop a model to link surface and groundwater, but there were never any resources for that to go ahead. They got to stage one, decided that it was an important thing to do, but it has not gone ahead. But I was pleased that industry actually recognized there was a need here.

Even for each individual environmental impact assessment, they are not looking at the overall implications on a watershed basis or a regional area. That needs to be done.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Thank you. What you're telling us is important.

Dr. Schindler, do you also see a specific role that the federal government could play in your research?