Toxic Alberta: Oil Sands Toxins Rapidly Increasing

The Globe & Mail is reporting new data released by Environment Canada that shows Canada’s oil sands mining operations produce vast and fast-growing quantities of deadly toxins, including mercury, heavy metals and arsenic. In fact, researchers are reporting a significant increase of 26% in the volume of arsenic and lead in the surrounding watershed in the past four years.[source]

Syncrude facilities reflected off a toxic tailing pond

The arsenic and lead produced and deposited in tailings ponds is the direct result of an extremely energy intensive process of extracting oil from bitumen mines. The mines are owned by Syncrude Canada Ltd., Suncor Energy Inc., Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., and Royal Dutch Shell PLC.

This new information confirms what ecologists have been arguing for years: the environmental toll exacted by Canada’s auctioning off extracted oil from bitumen to multinational corporations is enormous. Last year alone Tar Sands mining produced 322 tonnes of arsenic, 651 tonnes of lead and measurable volumes of mercury, chromium, vanadium, hydrogen sulphide and cadmium.

In addition, the studies confirm that these companies also released huge amounts of pollutants into the air last year, including 70,658 tonnes of volatile organic compounds, which can damage the function of human organs and nervous systems, and 111,661 tonnes of sulphur dioxide, a key contributor to acid rain.

The numbers are contained in Environment Canada’s national pollutant release inventory, which details the dangerous compounds generated by industrial Canada. New numbers published this weekend track 85 mining facilities that generate tailings and waste rock. Of those, the oil sands produce just under 50,000 tonnes of reportable toxic substances.

Oil sands operations, produced the overwhelming bulk of several dangerous substances: for example, bitumen mines generated nearly all of the Canadian total of acenaphthene, one of a bevy of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons released around Fort McMurray. Such substances can cause tumours of the lung, skin and bladder, and some are carcinogens. And their volumes are growing in north-eastern Alberta: companies generated 42 per cent more acenaphthene in 2009 than they did in 2006.

Yet scientists say simply knowing how much pollution is generated by the oil sands does little to show how toxic the mines’ tailings are. What’s needed is the concentration of the substances – a figure Environment Canada does not provide.

John Giesy, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan and the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Toxicology, points to a potato as an example: a grocery store spud contains 600 to 700 chemicals, some of them carcinogens, but they’re in such small quantities that they’re not harmful. “Everything is toxic. It’s the concentration that makes the poison,” he said.

The actual toxicity of oil sands effluent remains a nascent field of scientific inquiry, and intensely guarded by corporate-funded efforts to prevent any research on oil sands toxicity whatsoever.

The numbers “are just ridiculously huge,” said Justin Duncan, a staff lawyer with Ecojustice who helped prosecute the 2007 court case that forced Environment Canada to release the data. “You’re talking hundreds of thousands of kilograms of heavy metals going into some of these tailings ponds. If one of these things bursts, it’s a catastrophic risk to the Athabasca River system.”

At what point is enough enough? Profit only trumps ecology for a short while...