in what way canadian oil sands are harm to nature and people.
T his week, the Canadian government will be in Bonn touting Canada's climate program. It will be joined by Canadian oil companies working to put a green hue on Canadian tar sands – but the earth shouldn't be fooled.
The truth is, Canada cannot nonetheless meet its own arguably weak climate targets. The state plans to expand oil and gas production despite testify that this is inconsistent with Paris goals. And then, in that location is the issue of the toxic sludge of waste products from Canada's tar sands destruction, which form what are known as tailings ponds.
Equally of this year, these ponds hold one trillion litres of sludge that is dissimilar any other industrial byproduct in the world. They contain a unique cocktail of toxic chemicals and hydrocarbons that will remain in molasses-similar suspension for centuries if left alone.
These open, unlined ponds currently cover 220 sq km, an expanse of land equivalent to 73 New York Primal Parks. A unmarried tailings swimming – the Mildred Lake Settling Basin – has been identified by the US Department of the Interior as the globe'due south largest dam.
These tailings ponds made international headlines in 2008 when 1,600 ducks flew into one of them. The resulting imagery of animals coated in oil was a powerful reminder of the costs of our global oil addiction.
Since so, the issue has slowly faded from public memory as the Alberta authorities's strident promises to clean up the ponds left Canada and the balance of the world under the impression the problem was being seriously dealt with.
However, last calendar month the regime of Alberta canonical a tailings direction plan for Suncor Energy Incorporated, the oldest mining visitor in the Canadian tar sands. By approving this plan, Suncor volition get an additional seventy years after their operations shut down to clean up the environmental mess that they have created over sixty years of oil extraction.
To exist clear, Alberta has a new progressive majority NDP government which has made some bully, long overdue strides in addressing social and environmental bug such every bit a coal phase-out and a cap on emissions from the tar sands.
However, even under this regime, the cumulative impacts of this fossil fuel development are growing and industry continues to obtain sweeping approvals that are shocking for their lack of environmental rigour.
The history of the regime'south weak attempts to accost tailings are shocking. A couple of years ago a directive was put into identify to require companies to reduce tailings. Not a single company complied. Rather than fining the companies or refusing permits, the authorities simply removed the directive.
This recent Suncor blessing highlights the staggering and growing cumulative environmental footprint of the Alberta tar sands. Mining the tar sands for oil produces over 3,600 tonnes of COtwo emissions per hectare, consumes freshwater at a rate that rivals the daily h2o use of several major Canadian cities combined, and has destroyed a New York City-sized chunk of boreal wood and muskeg habitat.
For these reasons, the tar sands have been dubbed the largest (and most destructive) industrial project in homo history.
Unfortunately, the now full-diddled ecology crisis of tar sands tailings ponds has only gotten worse in the final decade. In Canada, provinces and territories have jurisdiction over resource extraction, and the implementation of a new tailings regulation by the provincial regulator has resulted in a recent review of all tar sands operations tailings direction plans.
Suncor'due south plan is the beginning to be approved, but represents a typical submission. For this reason, the blessing decision has now set the precedent for what will be considered adequate by the regulator in the sector, and it isn't pretty.
While Suncor's mine volition shut down in 2033, they have been granted until subsequently 2100 to figure out how to make clean upwardly their tailings and reclaim the country. Moreover, they will be "treating" their tailings by dumping them in the bottom of pits and covering them with freshwater to form a permanent "lake".
The long-term ecological risks this creates extend far across Alberta, and fifty-fifty Canada. Several of the tailings ponds are now decades old. A failure of a single tailings dyke could event in contaminated waterways from Alberta'south Athabasca region through to the Arctic Body of water, that would make even the Exxon Valdez disaster expect balmy by comparison.
In add-on, government data shows that these tailing ponds are leaking and indigenous leaders have repeatedly called for health studies and noted that the expansion of the tarsands is violating their Treaty rights
The dire state of this situation is compounded by the very uncertain economic hereafter for tar sands mining. The tar sands industry's approach to tailings management since 1967 has been to procrastinate on cleaning up the mess until a silver bullet engineering is found to bargain with them.
Now, fifty years later, technologies to clean upward tailings that take been discovered are not existence implemented because they are expensive and government is not requiring them.
Meanwhile, the buck is being passed fifty-fifty further into the future. In 2015 the auditor general estimated that tailings liability now surpassed $20bn, a figure many say is bourgeois. Mining tar sands is one of the about expensive means to produce rough oil in the earth, and with the International Free energy Agency assessing 21st-century elevation oil need to be around the corner, information technology will exist among the first oil industries to face bankruptcy.
If they are non dealt with at present, tar sands tailings could become a permanent toxic legacy of the nigh reckless forms of 20th-century fossil fuel extraction.
Fortunately, however, there is even so time to shine a calorie-free on Canada's near shameful environmental clandestine and strength the polluters to pay upwards today before they are no longer around to practice so.
- Tzeporah Berman is a Canadian policy adviser on climate and energy bug and an offshoot professor of environmental studies at York Academy
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/14/canadas-shameful-environmental-secret-tar-sands-tailings-ponds