Thank you for providing us the opportunity to present here. We're very happy that the committee has come to Alberta.
My name is Simon Dyer. I'm the oil sands program director at the Pembina Institute, where I manage Pembina's research on oil sands development.
The Pembina Institute is a national sustainable energy think tank that works on sustainable energy solutions. We were founded in Drayton Valley, Alberta, in 1985.
We have researched the environmental impacts of oil sands development for over a decade and we are committed to responsible oil sands development. Unfortunately, Canada’s current approach to oil sands development is a case study in unsustainable development.
The manner in which the oil sands have developed includes many areas of federal jurisdiction beyond impacts on water. Unfortunately, the federal government has been very weakly involved in oil sands environmental management to date, despite these significant areas of jurisdiction.
I have a presentation that I've circulated in hard copy. I hope you will follow along with that.
Given the limited time available, I'll focus my comments on three main areas--the lack of protection of the flows of the Athabasca River, the unsustainable management of tailings, and the lack of adequacy and transparency in monitoring.
The federal-provincial management framework for the Athabasca River gives priority to oil sands production over protection of water and fisheries. Under the water management framework for the Athabasca River, there is no legal requirement for water withdrawals to be halted in order to protect fish habitat. The water management framework has a traffic-light system, identifying green, yellow, and red zones. During the red zone, fish and fish habitat are being damaged. Unfortunately, in this instance, red does not mean stop, and water withdrawals are allowed to continue, even when fish habitat damage is occurring.
Slide five looks at the current and future risks posed to water by unsustainable tailings management practices. It's estimated that there is a total of 720 million cubic metres of impounded liquid tailings on the landscape north of Fort McMurray. This amounts to 288,000 Olympic swimming pools of toxic waste. Tailings lakes now cover 130 square kilometres of land. That's an area the size of the city of Vancouver. On average, one and a half barrels of liquid tailings accumulate for every barrel of bitumen that is produced.
In over 40 years of oil sands development, no areas containing tailings have ever been certified as reclaimed, and industry has never demonstrated that they are able to deal with the toxic liquid waste in tailings lakes.
When you hear evidence from industry saying the first tailings ponds will be reclaimed in the next few years, this is misleading. The mature, fine liquid tailings will simply be piped to another location while those tailings lakes are filled in. Tailings lakes are toxic and contain hydrocarbons and naphthenic acids at concentrations of up to 100 times those found in bitumen.
Another risk is the risk of the catastrophic discharge, of course, which would be unthinkable.
In addition to the risks associated with current tailings production and the current risks in terms of seepage, which I'll talk about shortly, a bigger risk, I think, is the long-term fate of these tailings. Most Canadians would likely be astonished to learn that the accepted way to deal with this liquid waste in the long term is with an unproven concept called the “end pit lake”.
Other industries have end pit lakes. It's a place where you put water in a gravel pit at the end of the gravel pit's mine life, for instance. The oil sands are unique in that their tailings lakes or their end pit lakes will include toxic liquid waste at the bottom. The approved plan is simply to cap the liquid tailings waste with fresh water and hope that through a process called meromixis, in perpetuity, the upper water layers do not mix with the lower layers.
In slide eight, I show a cartoon from CEMA, the Cumulative Environmental Management Association, that shows exactly how these toxic liquid waste dumps are going to be a permanent feature on the landscape.
It's not possible to overemphasize what a risky and unproven concept this is. Concerns about the fact that this concept of an end pit lake has never been demonstrated are continually raised by federal and provincial regulators and by CEMA, yet all oil sands mines have been approved so far with this method. There are 25 end pit lakes approved and proposed so far on the landscape. There's a quote in my presentation that shows how, really, this is a complete experiment. We've never demonstrated that this is a sustainable solution.
I now want to talk about tailings seepage. Tailings lakes are leaking. I know you've heard mixed opinions on this during your stay. It's not surprising that there are mixed opinions, because there is a real absence of publicly available data to get to the root of this problem.
Last year, the Pembina Institute was commissioned to conduct a review of potential seepage from tailings ponds. We contacted the Government of Alberta on at least three occasions, asking for information on seepage data from groundwater wells. No data was provided on any occasion. It is unclear whether cumulative summaries of the data exist, whether the governments of Alberta or Canada have the capacity to analyze that data, or whether the Government of Canada has seen that data.
Despite some of the testimony you may have heard, assessments project that all tailings lakes leak, even after mitigation measures are accounted for. So even after the pumping you've heard about to move that material back to tailings lakes, there is still residual leaking into the environment--into the groundwater and the Athabasca River and its tributaries.
We did a very conservative assessment of environmental impact assessment data and found that tailings lakes could be currently leaking into the ground water at a rate of 11 million litres per day. This rate of leakage could more than double if current proposed projects proceed.
Occasionally, actual validated information on seepage is available. For instance, if you look at some recent approvals for Suncor, it was reported that their pond 1 was leaking into the Athabasca River at a rate of 1,600 cubic metres per day.
Finally, I want to comment on the availability and adequacy of publicly accessible data on oil sands environmental performance.
One of the unfortunate defining features of oil sands development is the lack of transparency and the absence of publicly available data for many elements of environmental concern, such as tailings seepage, tailings reclamation performance, and access to RAMP data. A clear and cumulative picture of the potential scale of tailings lake leakage has never been presented by the Alberta or federal government. It's been up to environmental organizations to try to project what those impacts may be.
There are many stakeholder concerns about inadequate monitoring of the Athabasca River. The regional aquatic monitoring program, RAMP, has been criticized as lacking provincial and federal government leadership. Federal reviewers of RAMP have raised significant concerns about the program itself, and we are not aware that these shortcomings have been addressed.
I'll also make it clear that the Pembina Institute has not been a member or participant in RAMP over the past six years. We simply have concerns about the credibility of the program and lack capacity to participate in all these different processes.
In conclusion, we urge the federal government to play a much more active role in oils sands environmental management. I would like to draw your attention to three specific recommendations.
First, we recommend that the federal government ensure no new approvals for oil sands mines until a scientifically based ecosystem base flow for the Athabasca River is established, beyond which withdrawals by all oil sands operations during the red zone or low-flow periods would be prohibited. The tragedy is that using off-stream water storage is an economically viable approach for the industry, but there's no regulatory requirement to store water and halt withdrawals, so we continue to see withdrawals during these low-flow periods.
Second, the federal government should ensure that no more oil sands mine approvals should be granted that include mature fine tailings or that propose unproven end pit lakes as a reclamation strategy.You've heard a lot of talk about the technological silver bullets that are going to improve the oil sands industry, but technology in the absence of regulation isn't going to drive the sort of change we need to see. Industry has been researching tailings ponds for 40 years, and it hasn't demonstrated they're able to deal with the solution. We need the regulatory levers that prohibit this unsustainable practice.
Finally, independent and transparent monitoring that has a strong, peer-reviewed, scientific basis is needed. Federal leadership is required to ensure that the data is publicly available and greatly enhanced. It should include comprehensive water quality, tailings reclamation, and tailings seepage information.
Thank you very much.