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.