Canada's Highway to Hell

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Incredibly, making one barrel of oil in the sands generates two barrels of toxic waste. Every day Syncrude dumps 250,000 tons of toxic guck into the pond behind the Syncrude Tailings Dam, which is now the world's largest dam in volume. (Only when China completes the Three Gorges Dam next year will Syncrude lose its record.) The pond is 13 miles long and holds 706 million cubic yards of water, pollutants, and sand. Jim Byrne, a water expert at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, figures that if all the toxic ponds at Syncrude and other mines were drained into Lake Erie, they would create a stinking pool nearly 10 inches deep. By 2030, the waste would sit three feet deep.

As for Suncor, John Semple can't figure out why the Canadian government ever allowed the company to create a pool of toxic waste so close to a river that feeds Canada's largest watershed (the Mackenzie River), sustains 300,000 aboriginal people, and eventually drains into the Arctic Ocean. "There's gotta be stuff leaking into the river," he said.

He's right. Suncor's Tar Island Dyke, the first tar-sands dam built in Fort McMurray, has been a leaky faucet for 40 years. At first engineers thought the dyke would have a life span of three years and be no more than 40 feet high. But they miscalculated: Today the dam towers 300 feet above the river and stretches nearly two and a half miles. It has experienced lots of problems, including "deformation creep" -- movement in the dam's foundations. To stop the slippage, Suncor recently installed a small berm at the toe of the dyke, which appears to have helped.

According to Norbert Morgenstern, an engineer and expert on tailings dams at the University of Alberta, the Tar Island Dyke drained toxic waste into the river for years. Now, as Semple surmised, the waste just seeps into the river. In a 2001 paper on tailings ponds, Morgenstern concluded that many failed, that their reliability is "among the lowest of earth structures," and that "well-intentioned corporations employing apparently well-qualified consultants is not adequate insurance against serious accidents."

At a 2006 symposium in Banff, Alberta, four Canadian engineers revealed that another tar-sands dyke was leaking naphthenic acids, trace metals, and ammonium into local groundwater. In the same year Alberta officials admitted at a public meeting that they hadn't yet coordinated efforts to "understand potential regional impacts on groundwater." Seepage from these man-made toxic lakes along the Athabasca River is creating a unique kind of wetlands. Although cattails and hummock grass thrive in the effluent, a 1999 study in the journal Ecological Applications found that indigenous fish were "unable to survive in wetlands containing tar-sands effluent." Tadpoles died or grew slowly. Useful plants, such as tomatoes, clover, and loblolly pine, which have been planted experimentally, just won't germinate in the toxic marshes.

Although industry promises to turn many abandoned mines into so-called lakes or some sort of poor man's forest supporting salt-tolerant trees and the odd bison, Canada's record on the reclamation of its mines is not encouraging. In 2002 the federal auditor general reported that negligent and understaffed regulators had let companies walk away from tailings full of arsenic and cyanide at abandoned mine sites throughout the north. "The financial burden of dealing with the legacy of northern abandoned mines is huge," the auditor general added, "and the federal government has not yet come to grips with it."

The Alberta government, which holds less than half a billion dollars in security bonds for $100 billion worth of mines, admits that its plan for reclamation is a work in progress: "Reclamation guidelines and a land capability evaluation system for reclaimed [tar] sands landscapes are currently under development and review."

The federal government, which stands to collect nearly $51 billion (Canadian) in taxes from the tar sands by 2020, hasn't bothered to do a comprehensive impact assessment on the project. Neither has Alberta, which will take in $44 billion in tar revenues over the same time period. In 2000 both governments offloaded that responsibility to a 44-member group, drawn largely from multinational corporations, called the Cumulative Environmental Management Association (CEMA).

CEMA's latest director, John McEachern, an amiable fellow who arrived from a job in Egypt as a national park administrator in the summer of 2006, explained that the association is composed of several working groups that are looking at surface water, reclamation, air pollution, and ecosystems. The groups all work on a consensus basis, so if industry doesn't want something studied, it doesn't get studied. Even though the rapid pace of tar-sands development astonishes McEachern ("It appears to me that the Alberta government hasn't done any deep thinking about the speed"), he admitted that CEMA isn't monitoring groundwater -- or tackling climate change. "It's not on the list," he said.

It's a serious omission, since the tar sands now represent Canada's largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions. An open-pit mine and its accompanying upgrader, which converts bitumen into lighter crude by either removing carbon or adding hydrogen, spew out as much greenhouse gas in a day as 1.35 million cars. Yet a string of policy initiatives by successive governments in Ottawa have failed to reduce emissions nationally by any meaningful measure.

Although the current government proposes to reduce the intensity of greenhouse gas emissions in the tar sands by 40 percent by 2020, this approach will allow new mines to increase total carbon pollution by 248 percent above 2000 emission levels. By 2020 tar-sands emissions will exceed 140 megatons and account for 15 percent of all Canada's emissions. This helps explain why Canada is failing to meet its commitment to reduce greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol. Recent government estimates suggest that in 2010, Canada will miss its Kyoto target by at least 270 megatons, or almost 30 percent. The breakneck development of the tar sands also explains why Canada's auditor general found "inadequate leadership, planning, and performance" in the country's climate change programs. At the moment only three of 49 major companies in Alberta's oil patch have any plans to deal with carbon emissions or global warming.

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