Environment Committee on June 9th, 2009

[Dr. David Boerner]

Alfonso, do you want to respond?

[Dr. Alfonso Rivera]

Sure.

Yes, there is a baseline, but we don't have it. We haven't done it. It's Alberta Environment that has it.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

But when does it start?

[Dr. Alfonso Rivera]

I do not know the exact dates.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you very much.

We're going to move on.

Mr. Calkins.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Why, thank you, Mr. Chair.

I certainly appreciate having an opportunity to ask some questions of our panel here. I certainly appreciate the testimony I've heard so far. It's been quite enlightening.

I worked for a number of years for Environment Canada. I also worked for Alberta Environment in a different capacity. Basically, I was one of the cogs in the wheel who was constantly doing surface water samples and so on. So we do have lots of those inventories. I was taking samples, whether it was potable water at a park or water from a lake that I happened to be working near, and so on.

You made reference to Alberta's “Water for Life” strategy, which is the one that started in 2007 and goes out for 10 years. I was on a municipal council in Alberta, and when you look at Alberta, there's a large move to go away from groundwater or aquifer use to regional water and waste water systems. The town I live in, for example, along with several other partnering communities, is now using or drawing water from the Red Deer River, which is a non-glacier-fed river. We found immediately that the aquifers we were drawing down—we would notice a steady decline—have now almost completely recharged within a year and a half, or much faster than we had anticipated or the engineers had suggested the aquifers would recharge. So I thought that was quite interesting.

When you take something like that, where make a best guess, and we apply it to what's happening in, let's say, the oil sands.... You guys know what the geology is. We know where the formations are. We know where the water is and, to a certain degree, how that water moves through there. So when we're going through that whole process, what are the unknowns that we need to know? We're going to go through this study—Ms. Duncan referred to it—and I think it's going to take time to tackle these things.

Now, I've heard stories. I've talked to people who have gone out into the Paskapoo area, where they've actually put dyes in the water. They monitored where the dyes ended up, so they could trace where these waters moved through the aquifers, and so on.

How much more do we need to know, in your opinion, before we can at least be comfortable knowing that when we issue permits or licences for development, we can be relatively sure we're doing the right thing? How far away are we from that?

[Dr. Alfonso Rivera]

I cannot speak on behalf of Alberta, but I can tell you from the point of view of hydrogeology and science and the experience we have with our program.

I think I can wrap up your question in three points.

This applies mostly everywhere, but particularly in the Athabasca oil sands, we need, and they need--we all need--to specify very clearly what is the sustainable safe yield off those aquifers. What I mean by that is what is the exact amount that can be sustainably extracted without affecting anything else around it?

It would be very technical to explain, but think about a reservoir where you have water running into it and you have water running out of it. You have to know the exact amount of the lame d'eau that you can extract without having adverse effects. That is not known. We call it the sustainable safe yield.

The second thing that is very important to learn is transport mechanisms. I also heard earlier this morning a question about the groundwater contaminated all the way to Yukon. That is a very tough question, but one about which I can say we do not know what other transport mechanism...because groundwater carries contaminants in very different ways: advection, dispersion, diffusion, and many different ways. The issues there are scales of time. You may have groundwater contamination that is stuck, that doesn't move, because of the different mechanical dispersion, etc.

The third thing, which we still do not know about very in-depth, are the surface water and groundwater connections. Given the geological nature of the buried valleys in the Athabasca area, sometimes they simply cross the river. They “outcrop”, let me say. This means that parts of the Athabasca and some other minor rivers also capture groundwater. In fact, if you measure sometimes the flow rate of the rivers, part of it is what we call the base flow. The base flow--even in the absence of rain, the river continues flowing--is in fact groundwater. Some of the amount of the buried valleys goes into the river. Not everything; they have mapped 27 buried channels in the Athabasca area.

So what I mean by surface water and groundwater interaction is that you need extensive monitoring to precisely evaluate what is the discharge--not the recharge, but the discharge--to the river.

If I go to the first point, sustainable yield, most people think that sustainable use of groundwater is to take the recharge and not pump more than the recharge. Sorry, but that's wrong. In fact, it's the discharge that counts, because the recharge is very slow. You may take 10 years or more before the aquifer is fully recharged again; don't forget, water is a cycle every year. However, in terms of the discharge, when you pump groundwater out, in fact what you are extracting is the discharge. In other words, if you extract more than what is discharging somewhere and you don't want to cause any effect, then you have to learn that.

So it's not the recharge. The recharge is important, of course, but you also have to understand; it's both the recharge and the--

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

The recharge is out of our control. We can't control how much it rains. All we can control is how much we extract.

[Dr. Alfonso Rivera]

That's right. Exactly.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Time has expired.

Mr. Trudeau.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

Thank you.

I thank Mr. Calkins for his line of questioning, because I'd like to follow up on that a little bit with Dr. Rivera.

Certain aquifers in North America were filled by the end of the last glacial era. That was the big recharge that created things. When we talk about drawing from aquifers, either for wells or for industrial usage, this is something new to the past 100 or 150 years to any significant amount. Before that, the past 10,000 years, there has been sort of a system built up.

Do we know, independently of recharge rates, there are consequences other than simply removing water? When we remove water from underground aquifers, we have new flows created. We have shifting patterns of behaviour down there that have never happened before. It's more than just, we have a pot, it's now empty, and it will be empty for a little while until it fills up again. There are actually new behaviours happening.

How much of the science is establishing what happened before? How much of the science is happening now? Is there a capacity to try to understand that difference?

[Dr. Alfonso Rivera]

Yes. Hydrogeology has evolved, as well, in the last 30 to 35 years. It went from being a qualitative type of geological branch to a more quantitative physical, or chemical, hydrogeology.

We have the tools. We understand the processes better. One thing is having the tools, knowing the processes and mechanisms. The other thing is collecting the data you need to assess a given aquifer.

All that is to say that I think the consequences, as you call them, could be enormous. So far, what we have learned from the aquifers we have mapped is that most of the aquifers in Canada are in pre-development conditions, meaning that they don't have a long-term transient effect yet. But that does not apply to every aquifer. Some do. An example is the buried channel type in Estevan between Saskatchewan and Montana. That behaviour we never suspected would happen, because it takes much longer to recover after pumping than we thought. That's one thing. Another thing is that we learn from other studies elsewhere in North America, such as from the United States.

Two consequences can also happen, depending on the type of rock. If you have a certain amount of groundwater, and the aquifer is located between clays with some compressibility, what you may have is land subsidence, les tassements. The ground collapses, so you have land subsidence, as we have seen already in California, Houston, and elsewhere.

A third consequence, which is also sometimes very important, is saltwater intrusion. You go into aquifers that are around the coastlines, and if you pump the freshwater in the aquifers, you may induce salt water from the sea into the aquifer, so you contaminate it. What we have observed that is interesting in Canada is that we may have saltwater intrusion not on the coastline but within the continent. That's very interesting.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

That was my question also about the saline reservoirs they institute. Extraction is making the use of saline an issue. Where does that saline water come from? Is it salt water, as you were saying it might be, from the ocean? Or is it just mineral content within the...?

[Dr. Alfonso Rivera]

It's not only salt.

Let me give you an example for comparison reasons. Salt water from the sea contains in the order of 31 grams per litre. The salt water in the area of the Athabasca has ten times more, 350 grams per litre, of TDS, or total dissolved salts.

That is brine. It is extremely salty. It comes from the Devonian types of rocks, which are lower than the basal magma formation, which is the one they extract in the sands--the bitumen. If you fly over the area--I have done it--you will see spots of salt springs. There are salt springs naturally flowing out there, which means, for us, hydrogeologists, that there are hydrologic connections between the three types of aquifers. Really salty water can come up to the surface naturally.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

This is the beginning of understanding. This is a fairly new science. Has this been integrated into the planning process for oil sands projects? Are you seeing responsible long-term management of this integrated into either the government side in permitting or in the proposals of companies and such?

[Dr. David Boerner]

There is a well-established understanding of this in some realms. In oil and gas exploration, for example, they are very careful to seal off their well holes so that they don't create a hydrologic connection between two layers. So that understanding, I think, is there.

There is actually a legal framework, and people follow it all the time. I guess the limitation would be whether you understand what you're going through when you drill these holes and whether you inadvertently create connections between places. But I think we do have an understanding of how they could connect so that we can prevent them from connecting. Lack of knowledge means that sometimes you do your best and you still make a mistake. That's the philosophy on this.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Your time has expired.

Mr. Woodworth, the floor is yours.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

I very much appreciate the evidence you gentlemen have given us today and the approach you're taking.

One area that tweaks my interest stems from a comment one of you made to the effect that, as you know, Alberta is doing a lot of work in this area.

I regret to say that I do not know, and that Alberta has not been terrifically forthcoming, as I understand it, to our committee.

You may have detected some note of surprise around the table at the answer given that they have a baseline for this Athabasca River system.

My first question to you is whether or not you can assist us in directing us to any relatively easily digestible documents, that are publicly accessible from the Alberta government, on the Athabasca River area, and in particular on the buried paleovalleys you've identified as the relevant aquifer.

I don't expect you to tell me that right now.

I see you nodding your head, so may I assume that you might be able to send us something in that regard?

[Dr. Alfonso Rivera]

Yes.

Let me tell you that they have systematically studied the three areas: Cold Lake, the Athabasca oil sands, and the Peace River oil sands. In these three cases, they used a four-step approach. First they studied the groundwater quantity. Next they studied the groundwater quality. Then they built a numerical model to integrate that. At the end, they prepared a framework for groundwater management.

The Cold Lake area is the most extensively studied and known. The Alberta Geological Survey has published their results on their website at www.ags.gov.ab.ca.

For the Athabasca oil sands, they did not do all of the work themselves. They did part of it. Alberta Environment gave the work to consultants. This is not public yet because they want to finish the framework for groundwater management first and then build a numerical model base.

For the third one, the Peace River, they also have done the work on the first and second steps, but not the model. That is also available on the Alberta Geological Survey's website.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Gentlemen, do you and your department know enough about the work that underlies the existing Athabasca River management framework to express an opinion about whether in fact it has yielded sufficiently reliable information as to make the environmental assessment that's been done solid and reliable? Can you express an opinion?

[Mark Corey]

No. I would have to say that we haven't actually looked at that.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

All right.

Regarding the 2012 timeline you've referred to for your work in the Athabasca River system, Ms. Duncan asked one of my questions, which was whether it could be accelerated.

I understand your answer about that, but I'd like to know if, when you're done, it will answer the three questions that you so articulately outlined to us a few moments ago, Dr. Rivera, about sustainable safe yield and transfer mechanisms and surface water collections. Will we have that information through your efforts by 2012 regarding the Athabasca area?

[Dr. Alfonso Rivera]

I believe so.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Excellent.

I understand there has been some preliminary assessment done in this area. Is that a public document? Again, could you reference it for us as to where we might get a copy or how lengthy it is? I don't know if it's readable for a layman.

[Dr. Alfonso Rivera]

For the Athabasca?