Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'm very pleased, members of the committee, to have an opportunity to be here today on behalf of the Pembina Institute.
I'm a senior policy analyst with the institute, and last week you had the opportunity to hear my colleague Dan Woynillowicz talking about some of the issues. He would have told you that the Pembina Institute is a non-profit, non-governmental organization, so I won't need to tell you more about the Pembina Institute.
What I would like to say is that we had hoped that Amy Taylor, who is director of ecological fiscal reform, could also have been here today as she was invited, but she had a prior commitment, and both our invitations came rather late.
The three of us together, Dan, Amy, and I, worked on a report Troubled Waters, Troubling Trends, which the Pembina Institute published this year. I believe you have already received the summary of the report, and it has been translated for you. I will refer to this as I'm talking.
I would first like to mention something about the oil sands mining, which is the most conspicuous aspect of the oil sands activities and which has a major impact on rivers and wetlands. The wetlands must be drained before the overlying deposits are removed to expose the bitumen. In addition, the basal aquifer, which is the water layer underlying the bitumen, also has to be drained so the mines don't flood. That can cause considerable drawdown of waters and also of wetlands.
Bitumen itself forms only about 10% to 12% of the total amount of material that is mined, and extracting it requires huge volumes of water. Even with water recycling, it still takes between two and four and a half barrels of water to produce a barrel of synthetic crude oil. The majority--two-thirds in fact--of all the withdrawals from the Athabasca River are for oil sands mining, as you can see on the graph on page 3 of your brochure. So the Athabasca River is incredibly important in supplying water for the oil sands.
Existing projects have already been allocated as much water as the city of Calgary, and you can see that in the left-hand bar in the graph on page 4. Calgary, of course, is a city with a population of about a million, so already the existing three or four projects are using as much water as is used within the city of Calgary. If we take the existing and approved projects, as shown by the second bar in the graph on page 4, we see that they've been allocated roughly twice as much as has been allocated already. To expand--for all the planned projects as well as the existing ones--would mean using as much water as the city of Toronto does. That's for just the oil sands mining operations. That gives you an idea of the volume of water that is used or is required.
Less than 10% of this water returns to the Athabasca River. I think that's rather different from what happens to water used for municipal purposes. There are major concerns. Is there sufficient water in the river to meet the instream flow needs to keep the river ecosystem healthy, especially as the flows are very low in winter and also highly variable from year to year?
The Cumulative Environmental Management Association, CEMA, which you've already heard about, has unfortunately failed to determine what the instream flow needs levels are, and it was left to Alberta Environment to establish an interim framework for the instream flow needs and water management on the lower part of the Athabasca River. This happened because the Energy and Utilities Board recommended in a decision that it was so important to have these instream flow needs that if CEMA couldn't come up with a figure after five years, by January of 2006, the duty would fall to Alberta Environment.
The interim framework that Alberta Environment proposed set a series of flow-rate thresholds, potential environmental impacts, and required management action, but this framework has not yet been implemented. It has undergone several drafts, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada is now partnered with Alberta Environment to work on it. Still, the most recent draft, of July 10, is unsatisfactory as far as the aboriginal and environmental communities are concerned because it would still allow withdrawals from the river, even during a red alert when there would be significant risk of impacts to the river.
So as a result, there is currently no management framework in place, and in the meantime, new projects are going ahead, or there are hearings for them, as is the case for Imperial's coal mine. They want new water licences, and it looks as though new decisions will be made about allocating water, yet we still don't have a sound water management framework in place.
Upon leaving the oil sands area, the Athabasca River flows along the eastern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park and into the Peace-Athabasca Delta. This delta is the largest boreal delta in the world, and one of the most important waterfowl staging and nesting areas in North America.
Oil sands mining operations have been listed as one of the threats to the integrity of the Peace-Athabasca Delta because of the volumes of water withdrawn from the Athabasca. The delta has already been hugely impacted by the Bennett Dam in B.C., which has affected changes in the flow of the Peace River. More research is needed to determine how the oil sands activities actually impact on the ecosystem and also on the aboriginal fishing in the delta.
As I've said, only a small portion of the water used from the Athabasca River goes back. Most of it ends up in tailings ponds. The National Energy Board has said that tailings management is daunting, because once the bitumen is separated, a lot of that water is contaminated with the sand and the residual bitumen. These residuals are, with the water, called tailings, and they're sent to tailings ponds. But it's a misnomer to call them tailings ponds. The diked area holding the tailings already covers 50 square kilometres, so these are hardly ponds.
As well, the water in these ponds is actually contaminated with various pollutants from the bitumen, with such things as naphthenic acids, which make the water toxic to fish and birds. Birds have to be prevented from alighting on these tailings ponds. We just have to hope that the water from the tailings ponds doesn't leach into groundwater or the soil.
So far, although there have been experiments with new processes to develop better forms of tailings with less water in them--so-called consolidated tailings, in which the sand and the fine tailings stay together--there still has not been completely satisfactory reclamation processes that avoid large volumes of these fine tailings that have to go to tailings ponds. For example, so far, with the experiments with consolidated tailings, only about 10 hectares have actually been reclaimed to a grass vegetation, not at all like the native boreal forest and peat wetlands.
As far as the mines are concerned, some of the larger areas have been reclaimed, but no reclamation certificate has been issued for any of the areas so far.
Companies are working on new technologies to try to reduce the volume of water used in bitumen mining. There are new processes to develop consolidated tailings, and the bitumen process is a dry tailings process. However, experts say that there probably won't be major breakthroughs or alternatives to water-based bitumen extraction before the year 2030.
The bitumen operations for mining get the most attention, but in fact, as you'll see from the map on the front page of the Troubled Waters brochure, the bitumen deposits underlie about one-fifth of Alberta. This means that 93% of the bitumen is actually too deep to mine and has to be extracted in situ by drilling wells through the overlaying deposits and into the bitumen.
At the present time, about one-third of Alberta's bitumen is actually recovered through in situ operations. As I say, it doesn't get the public eye, but it is very significant. Again, it uses a lot of water to generate the steam that is injected into the bitumen to warm and soften it so that the bitumen can be pumped to the surface.
Although the in situ operations use less water than the mining operations on a per barrel basis, only about one-fifth of that is surface water. Two-fifths come from deep saline groundwater, and nearly two-fifths come from surface or shallow groundwater--fresh groundwater, in other words--which in Alberta is defined as water with less than 4,000 milligrams a litre of total dissolved solids.
I am particularly concerned about the impact of the in situ operations on the shallow groundwater. Geologists are still learning about groundwater resources in northern Alberta. Alberta Environment itself certainly doesn't have enough monitoring wells in the area. There is insufficient baseline data to be able to analyze what the long-term impacts are of a drawdown of aquifers.
Certainly while a project is operating and drawing on a shallow aquifer, it may be lowering the level of the water for 30 or 40 years. It could take decades after operations cease before the water level re-establishes. Since a lot of the wetlands will have been reduced, one wonders if the level actually will re-establish. With climate change, the rate of recharge may be less in the future than it has been in the past.
When saline water is used to generate the steam, it's not the end of the problems, because one still has to treat the water, both for recycling and also for the waste products from recycling. Also, when it's saline water, the waste products then have to be disposed of, often in landfills, which then have to be monitored, and the leachate has to be pumped out because of the brine in the residual material that goes to their landfill.
Although in situ operations use less water than mining, there are still a lot of different concerns, especially as the area impact will be much greater. Efforts are again under way to reduce the use of water, but it has been increasing very rapidly so far, as you can see from the top graph on page 4 of the brochure. Pilot projects to reduce the use of water include using a mixture of solvents and steam. There's also a new project called toe-to-heel air injection, which burns some bitumen in situ to warm the oil and then uses the heat from the residual burning of the bitumen to warm up further bitumen, which then melts, but it's too early to say if these techniques will be successful.
In the meantime, new projects that will probably last 30 or 40 years are being approved. These projects are again being allocated water. Last week my colleague Dan told you about the very rapid growth in the oil sands. Our concern is what can be done to reduce the use of water per barrel, because given the expected growth from about a billion barrels a day to perhaps five or six billion by 2030, it's incredibly important to reduce the amount of water required per barrel of synthetic crude oil.
We have made various recommendations for reducing the use of water or for encouraging industries to reduce the use of water. Some of them are on page 2 of the brochure. I'd like to mention one, which was the implementation of user fees for the fresh water for oil recovery that does not flow back into the watershed. We would suggest that this would not be a tax, but would be money going into a dedicated water management fund that could be used to improve knowledge on our groundwater, to improve the knowledge of our rivers and the management of the water resource, and to finance research for other methods to reduce oil recovery.
We believe that good management requires good information on both surface water and groundwater quality and quantity. Alberta certainly needs a comprehensive groundwater monitoring system and database in order to develop watershed budgets. The long-term water balance in each basin and sub-basin, including the sustainable yield from aquifers, should form the basis of future watershed planning and water allocations.
In our Troubled Waters, Troubling Trends report we said effective water management requires a comprehensive policy framework that's based on solid data and scientific information and provides adequate protection for ecosystems. We hope the federal government will play an effective role in reducing the impacts of the oil sands operation on the environment in the areas where it has jurisdiction.