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Oil on troubled waters
- mahmed726
- Jun 14, 2023
- 4 min read
Mention to someone from Alberta, Canada, the subject of tar-sand mining for oil and you will soon find yourself deep in a highly controversial topic. On the one hand, it provides jobs and much-welcome income for the Province, but every barrel of oil extracted adds further fuel to the climate crisis, to say nothing of the hugely destructive impact on the landscape. Just search ‘Alberta tar-sand mining’ on YouTube and you will quickly grasp the enormity of the issues.
There are times, however, when things should be pretty straightforward and the answers very clear – or so you would think. Peatland wetlands are the world’s great carbon stores. They contain at least twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests, including tropical rainforest, and store it over millennial timescales, but when they are dug up or drained they rapidly release this stored carbon back into the atmosphere.
The McClelland Lake Wetland Complex in Alberta is an extraordinary fen peatland system lying within an almost undisturbed catchment. A fen peatland develops because of, and is sustained by, groundwater flowing through it and is thus dependent upon this water supply from the surrounding catchment. Thanks in part to the efforts of the Alberta Wilderness Association (AWA) to highlight the importance of this wetland complex, the Ft. McMurray-Athabasca Oil Sands Subregional Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), recognised the special character of the wetland complex and acknowledged the likely impact of tar-sand mining. In 1996 it decreed that: “In-situ oil sands development will not be permitted within McClelland Lake or the adjacent wetland fen”. All to the good, you would have thought.
Sadly not. The tar sands beneath the McClelland peatland are reported to contain a billion barrels of oil so, in 2002, the decision to protect the wetland complex from tar-sand mining was reversed – “to reflect a balanced approach” – and approval was given for TrueNorth Energy’s proposed Fort Hills project, which involved excavating 49% of the McClelland Lake Wetland Complex and 45% of McClelland Lake fen, on condition that a suitable programme was put in place to guarantee the maintenance of the remaining unmined area. Through a series of corporate take-overs, the granted approval has now passed to Suncor Energy, the Calgary-based energy company, who have proposed a 10 km wall to protect the wetland complex, which lies downslope and downstream from the proposed tar-sand mining area and must therefore receive its water in some way from the tar-sand mining operation. The condition remains, however, that a programme must be put in place to ensure the continued survival of the wetland complex. Meeting this condition has proved to be far more of a challenge than Suncor perhaps first appreciated. Meanwhile, the AWA has continued to argue that meeting this condition will actually be impossible and that the originally-granted permission should be withdrawn.
The world has moved on since the original permission was granted in 2002. Back then, the Kyoto Protocol of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change had only just been signed and was not due to come into force until 2005. Climate change was something that governments talked about at conferences but had little bearing on day-to-day decisions such as whether to extract an extra 120,000 barrels per day of much-needed oil from a soggy wasteland in the north-eastern corner of Alberta.
Today there is an acknowledged Climate Crisis. Wildfires are raging, droughts are searing huge swathes of the planet, temperatures are soaring and there is even talk of some parts of the globe becoming ‘death zones’ because the combination of heat and humidity will overwhelm the body’s ability to sweat and regulate internal temperature. The prospect of releasing a billion barrels of oil into the atmosphere no longer looks so trivial, and runs directly counter to the Canadian Government’s own legally-binding commitment to the Paris Accord. Indeed the Alberta Energy Regulator has now announced that it is reconsidering the original granting of mining consent and is looking very hard at the proposed assurances that the mining will not damage the wetland complex.
Suncor’s latest proposals to convince the regulator run to eight volumes including an Appendix which itself runs to more than 1,000 pages. Somewhat chillingly, the AWA, in wishing to have an expert review of these proposals, has found it extremely difficult to find independent Canadian wetland scientists who have not received research funding from Suncor. A small number of experts have been able to provide in-depth reviews of the Suncor proposals, but the AWA has felt the need to cast the net wider, and so I, too, was asked to provide an expert review.
My own view is that the proposals are filled with data about the existing conditions of the wetland complex but extremely short of detailed information about conditions that would prevail once mining has begun. There is much reliance on modelling but as has been pointed out, “models are not reality – they are created to develop hypotheses which are then tested against reality”. Unfortunately Suncor has not undertaken any actual field testing of their modelled proposed wall and irrigation system on small test sites outside the development area, admitting instead that practical implementation of their models is currently ‘conceptual’ only.
The AWA has now submitted its case to the Alberta Energy Regulator, so we wait to see whether oil is still king in Alberta, or whether the winds of change mean that other values are now beginning to prevail, values of long-term carbon storage, values of clean waters, values of rich biodiversity, values for indigenous people, values of sustainable use of the land. We shall see….
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