:
Yes, we're making the assumption that we're not meeting next Tuesday.
I think there's understanding that we'll have Mr. Hyer here, we'll go through at least two rounds with him, and then we'll move into future business, if that's okay with you, Mr. Warawa. That should give us an hour and an hour.
Is there any other discussion?
Seeing none, I'll call the question.
(Motion agreed to)
The Chair: We'll move on to the rest of our meeting.
Joining us at the table is Dr. George Dixon, vice-president, university research, and professor of biology, University of Waterloo, and Dr. James Barker, professor of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, also at the University of Waterloo.
I welcome both of you and look forward to your presentation as we conclude our discussion on Canada's oil sands and the water resources surrounding them.
I'd ask that you make opening comments. If you can keep them under 10 minutes each, I'd appreciate that very much.
:
Good morning, and thank you very kindly.
It's a great pleasure to have the opportunity to meet with the committee this morning. I'm going to give you just a very brief background, and then I have made four recommendations in here based on my work in the oil sands for about 15 years, where I saw issues that needed to be addressed going forward.
My understanding is that I have something in the order of eight minutes, and I hope I won't take anywhere near that time to address some of these issues. Jim Barker and I are actually going to give a brief summary and then present ourselves for questioning. We have seen that you have been through a lot of testimony, and we expect you might have some points of clarification you feel we could assist you with.
I and a number of my colleagues have been working on the oil sands since about 1983. We have effectively worked in two areas of research, one that I'll call on-lease activity, that is, research done on the leases of the oil sands companies—predominantly Syncrude and Suncor, because those were the only two active companies out there when I started doing this type of work--and the other area of activity that we've undertaken is what I'll call off-lease activity, the activity of trying to look for effects in the environment in the Athabasca River.
The work we've been doing on the leases has really been directed toward two end-points. One of them is the environmental toxicology of the chemicals that are associated with the water used to extract bitumen from the oil sands. These are principally naphthenic acids, which I suspect you've heard about before, and alkylated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a class of compounds associated with all oils. We have also looked at issues around salinity, both sodium salinity and sulphate salinity, that occur when you effectively expose the oil sands to water and the salts leach out and end up in the processed water that's associated with extraction.
We've been doing this work on the leases for two reasons. One of them is basic toxicology, to try to determine the threshold concentrations of these chemicals that would be expected to cause an effect in aquatic organisms. Once you have that body of toxicology information, you can effectively start to set water quality standards, or PWQOs, provincial water quality standards in Alberta; or federal water quality guidelines, through CCME, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment. For naphthenates, there are no standards of that nature because the basic toxicology was never done.
So we're looking at understanding the toxicology of those compounds, should there ever be a requirement to effectively set standards for the release of waters into the Athabasca drainage.
The other reason we're trying to understand these compounds' toxicity has to do with the so-called end-pit lake strategy, where you effectively put tailings of some form into a mined out area, cap them with water, and hope that through time this will develop into a natural lake system. When I say “hope”, I mean there have been a number of scale-up demonstrations associated with this, but the only full-scale first attempt at an end-pit lake has yet to be initiated. It is going to be done by Syncrude Canada with their Base Mine Lake tailings pond. My understanding is that Suncor is in the planning stages to initiate their first end-pit lake within the next, I think, probably two to three years. Those are, technically speaking, demonstration activities.
The other area we have been looking at has to do with off-lease activity. We have been looking for impacts associated with oil sands-type materials in the Athabasca watershed. I had some references included in the work we've done looking at impacts on larval fish and impacts on reproductive activity in free-living fish in the Athabasca drainage area. We did most of that work prior to 2003. Really, what we're looking at there is whether we can demonstrate effects in the Athabasca watershed of oil sands-like materials. They may come from natural erosion of oil sands deposits in the area, or they may come from activity—although at the present time, I expect the majority of the effects we're seeing in the receiving environment may in fact be the result of naturally occurring oil sands. But no one has really looked at that to any great extent.
So those are the two areas of activity.
There are key concerns to be addressed. I had four issues that I think we need to be conscious of as a society as we move forward in looking at exploitation of these oil sands resources. As I stated above in my brief, there are chemical inputs into the river that occur naturally and there are inputs that can occur from industrial activity. We don't know what the relative contributions from each are. We don't know whether or not the system can accept any further loading of oil sands-type materials beyond what is naturally occurring. We really have no standards of how we would effectively allow any kind of a release from the system, should it occur. In some ways we really are not fully cognizant of what the potential cumulative impacts are of the various oil sands industries or the other municipal and industrial and agricultural uses of water in that watershed.
By the way, when I'm talking about impact in the system, I'm really talking at the present time about defining whether there are effects we can observe in the system now. That's one question. The second one, after you've established whether or not there are effects, is what's causing those effects. They may be naturally occurring. They may be as a result of anthropogenic activity. The first step is to take a look in the environment to a greater extent than we have done now.
The other area that I don't really think we have a fully integrated, sustainable management strategy for is water in the Athabasca drainage, in terms of surface water and groundwater and interaction. I'm going to let Jim speak to that to a greater extent.
At the present time we have not spent a lot of effort as a society looking at what I would call ecosystem and human health impacts of potential contaminants that are transported off the oil sands leases into the Athabasca drainage. There is no permitted surface water, effectively emissions, into that system at the present time. There are very likely a couple of groundwater inputs to the Athabasca River. We know very little about what I would call atmospheric transport and deposition associated with the potential contaminants. What we really need to be looking at are the potential impacts of that. Can we quantify them? Can ecosystem benchmarks and standards be developed that would allow us to look at the potential impacts that are there at the present time?
Remember, I want to get back to this first question. I'm not particularly worried at the present time about attributing blame in terms of who is responsible for what in terms of the impacts. Let's find out if there are effects first and then worry later about where they're coming from in terms of a risk analysis and division mechanism that would allow us to identify where they are coming from.
The last comment I will make has to do more with information availability and assimilation activity around all the data that's available in the oil sands. Integration of activity is a very large issue. Up until about five or six years ago, a relatively limited number of players were doing research in this arena. As the number of oil sands companies has increased, as the number of different monitoring programs has increased, at the present time the total impact of the work fails from an inability to integrate all that information and pull it together to be able to make a decision framework type of exercise. You have the northern river basins study that provided data. The Panel on Energy Research and Development, PERD, produces this information and funds research. CEMA produces research. RAMP produces research. CONRAD produces research. There is a certain degree of overlap among the activities they undertake, but often information is available to one group that would be of very great use to the others. But the mechanisms for moving that forward and trying to integrate that are at the present time relatively difficult.
I've been working there for 15 years with a number of different partners and I have difficulty pulling data together from some of these different areas when I actually know what data I'm looking for. If you're in a situation where you don't have that body of experience and you literally don't know the one person to call who has that information, it becomes a much more difficult exercise.
I'm going to stop at this point and then pass it on to Jim Barker, who will talk a bit about oil sands and then some further issues around disintegration. I don't know whether you'd like both of us to speak and then go to questions or....
:
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be able to address you.
As Dr. Dixon said, I'm a professor in earth and environmental sciences at Waterloo. My research has really been focused on groundwater issues in the oil sands and in the mining area of the oil sands. I have a number of collaborations at Waterloo, the University of Alberta, and the University of British Columbia. I'm also a member of Suncor's oil sands mine development and reclamation review board; however, I don't represent Suncor or that review board in this presentation. It does give me some additional exposure to the problems that Suncor faces with water, however.
I'm really focusing on the groundwater issues in the oil sands mining area. I recognize that groundwater is perhaps even a more important aspect of the in situ operations, but I don't have any personal research experience in that area.
The major concern in the oil sands mining areas, as Dr. Dixon said, is seepage of process-affected water into aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. My research is really focused on those issues, looking at groundwater as a potential pathway to these receptors. My research has been within the operational phases of the oil sands facilities and really is not being done in the context of the ultimate reclamation. However, the research that we provide I think gives us insight that we can see starting to be incorporated into planning and reclamation.
So in terms of seepage from tailings structures, you've heard testimony about it. My research has examined the migration and fate of contaminants in process-affected water as it moves in the subsurface. The source of this water has been the tailings facilities. Our research, for example, demonstrates that a small fraction of the seepage can escape the current collection systems we have. That information is relayed back to the operators, and it should lead to improved dike seepage collection and maintenance, which seem to be the main issues in allowing some uncontrolled seepage.
You have seen Suncor's Tar Island dike and Pond 1. It's always nice to get a tour of that area. It's a large area. Suncor's Tar Island dike contains Pond 1, the oldest pond in the industry. We've just had accepted a research paper that provides a hydro-geological analysis of the seepage from this pond and dike system, and our findings are consistent with findings of Suncor's consultants over the years. So I don't think we provided much new information to the company. Seepage of process-affected water is occurring from Tar Island dike into the sediments of the Athabasca River, so in a sense I'm delivering a problem to Dr. Dixon now.
The interesting part for us is that the numerical modelling that tries to tie together all the available data suggests the bulk of the seepage water is from the dike, not from the pond. It's a bit of a moot point because the dike in fact was constructed with process-affected water, so the leakage from the dike is chemically very similar to the leakage from ponds. However, since the dikes are dewatering naturally, the impact will be less over time. If it were leaking just from the pond, and if the pond were never reclaimed, you could imagine the leakage continuing over time.
Many of you have seen, I think, Suncor's initial efforts to reclaim Pond 1. I was up there last week, and I think they're on schedule for completion of the removal of the fine tailings this year, and they've actually started placing reclamation material on that pond. So that's some very timely progress.
Waterloo graduate students, technicians, and faculty have also investigated other areas where process-affected water is seeping into groundwater. Again, our research is trying to assess the fate of these chemicals as they move through groundwater. Naphthenic acids have been our focus. We build upon laboratory research at Alberta and Waterloo and in the National Water Research Institute in Saskatoon.
The bottom line so far is that the major toxicants in naphthenic acids don't undergo any significant attenuation in the groundwater system. They're just diluted by the normal weak dispersive processes that occur there.
An interesting aspect of that research has been an attempt to identify whether or not these plumes of process-affected water are leaching toxic metals from the aquifer. The view would be that if the plume was causing the leaching of natural metals, the owner of the plume would be the owner of the metals issue. To date, while iron and manganese have been mobilized, the toxic trace metals, including things like arsenic, show no indication of being mobilized. That research continues, but so far we haven't seen a significant problem in that context.
Seepage, I think, is certainly going to be a continuing problem in the operational phases of these plants. Newer oil sands tailings operations are forced, really by geography, to be located closer to or on top of sandy aquifers, so the potential for water to move into those aquifers and to move away is enhanced. Understanding the hydrogeology relationship between the pond, the dike, the groundwater, and the surface waters nearby will be critical to managing those seepages and minimizing them.
We now recognize that the risk of at least local groundwater contamination is fairly high, so in response researchers are also looking at evaluating potential ways to remediate those situations. One approach is to pump the water out of the ground and treat it on surface. That is consistent with what the oil companies are doing in terms of research to potentially treat their process-affected water in ponds.
Being hydrogeologists, we like to keep our heads in the sand as much as possible, so we're looking at in situ remediation methods. The research is at a very early stage, but what we're looking to do is see if there are any beneficial aspects of adding nutrients or other chemicals to the subsurface to enhance the natural rate of degradation.
What you really want to do is present the companies, the operators, with a number of options for remediating these situations should they occur. We'd rather have those options ready beforehand as opposed to too late.
I think Dr. Dixon has captured our concerns from a research perspective, and I'd like to really just focus on the last issue he brought up, which is this idea of what I would call a catalogue of what's gone on and who's done it. From my perspective as a member of the Canadian Water Network, which project Dr. Dixon leads, and through CONRAD and other venues in talking to colleagues, I'm continually amazed at how much research is actually going on related to water and the oil sands.
Like Dr. Dixon, I have a problem remembering who's doing what or even finding out who's doing what. For instance, we had a presentation a couple of weeks ago. The person from the Alberta Research Council was telling us about three projects that they've been undertaking in the last year, only one of which I was aware of, and those are our colleagues within the Canadian Water Network. Finding out what's going on is difficult for us.
As a researcher, I actually value different approaches. I don't think we want an organization telling us what to do and who's supposed to do what. For example, the different stakeholders have different needs that won't be served by all for one. What I'm really calling for is a way to try to pull the information together to get communication going among the researchers. That will make our work more efficient.
I guess my second concern stems from that. Is there a forum, then, for the research to be discussed? There are numbers of forums. Dr. Dixon often organizes a session within a larger meeting on toxicology. CONRAD organizes a meeting. Special sessions are often organized by various agencies and organizations, but these almost always tend to be well focused and with limited attendance.
What we think would be interesting, but almost impossible to do, is to offer some sort of venue where the research can be discussed and stakeholders can participate. As a member of the Canadian Water Network, I would put it forward as one of the vehicles that could help organize that sort of approach.
So my concerns really are cataloguing what's going on and finding a forum in which to have that discussed openly and freely.
Thank you very much for your time. I'll turn it back to you.
:
There have been two or three attempts to set up what I'd call larger data clearing-house activities, but most of them have failed as a result of a lack of human resources and financial resources.
I want to make a comment about RAMP. RAMP has been a program that has gone on for, I don't know, at least 15 to 20 years. It started out, I think, as a federal government monitoring program. It then was undertaken by the province. The province, I think, still manages it, but it's effectively supported largely by financial resources from the industry, and it's done by consultants. I don't take that as a problem. It's just a matter of being a statement of fact.
They respond to a need for information on sites where there could potentially be an impact. So they will go out and look at that. They might look at it for two or three years, and then they'll move to another site. They keep changing the actual sites they're looking at. They also change the parameters they're looking at based on individual demand. They change the reference sites they look at through time. So if you're trying to make some kind of decision on a 10-year basis of what's really going on, you'll have a three-year data set here and then switch to a four-year data set on another site. They keep changing the methods of chemical analysis, too. So it becomes a difficult entity to pull together.
You have to remember that when they started, there were two companies and a relatively small number of areas where you might expect an impact. Now we have six or seven leases that are active. They've broadened it, and they've kept moving stuff around because of resource issues. It's just poorly designed, I would suggest. That's the main problem. It's being done in good faith, but it's like trying to hit a moving target.
:
Perhaps I'll take a start at that. The Athabasca watershed is a relatively large area. In terms of baseline, there are two types of baselines that you're looking at. One of them is what I'll call lakes and rivers that are naturally occurring in the environment and are not underlain by oil sands. They're out there, but there are no oil sands in the deposit sitting underneath those lakes or rivers.
The second type of baseline you're looking at is naturally occurring systems where there are oil sands that are underlying the resource. The levels of naphthenic acids and PAHs will occur naturally; they're present in all of these systems. They're lower in the ones that are not underlain by oil sands. They're higher in the ones that are underlain by oil sands, and then when you get into the leases, where there's direct influence of process water, then they're very high.
To be perfectly honest, part of your question is the reason I've been trying to get—and have gotten hold of—old RAMP data to try to look at what's there. But we can still get that information by going sufficiently far away from the areas that are associated with oil sands activity, from either a groundwater or surface water area, and we can go in a wind direction that probably wouldn't be subject to atmospheric transport and deposition.
The ideal situation would be to have started 40 years ago with baseline activity. Most of my work is in what I call the impacts of base metal mining—copper, lead, cadmium, and zinc. I got into the oil sands business after I'd done quite a bit of research in this other area. In 30-odd years of working in that and in litigations on environmental activity and research, I have never had what I would call sufficient baseline data. So if you're looking to find it, it's almost never there.
I'll settle for four years of data—four consecutive years of data.
:
An end-pit lake is part of the reclamation process. If you take a look at the leases of the oil sands, you'll see that they have to return the leases to the control of the province in a state that they have—I think the terminology is—an equivalent ecological capacity to the pre-mine state. Now, please do not ask me to define what constitutes an equivalent ecological capacity, because in most cases people are still trying to figure that out.
If you take a look at that activity, you will see there are some things called dry landscape options, which are uplands that will be remediated and reforested. Then there are wet landscape activities, which involve end-pit lakes, and by lake I mean wetland that's probably got at least five metres of water in it. There will also be some wetlands—these are supposedly part of the plan—and then there will be streams that join these up together. When the province has accepted that they have been remediated to standard—the watershed will integrate back into the normal range of the Athabasca—I have no ability to predict when that would actually occur.
The end-pit lake is a strategy to effectively build some wetland component into this reclamation activity. Basically you take a mined-out area, you put some form of tailings in the bottom, usually mature fine tails, you then effectively put a water column on top of that, and you try to have a situation where—and this may be done through fertilizing or it may be done through planting—you end up developing a biological film at the interface on the floor of the lake. It's called the benthos, the biological film that sits between the water and the sediment. Most of these naphthenates and pHs are subject to biological degradation and they will break down through time in a water column. Some of the work I've done shows what happens and how the toxicity changes when that occurs. Effectively, you then have a situation where you have a lake that has water on the top and a naturally occurring biofilm over the material, and it should, through time, develop into a natural lake that becomes part of the reclamation strategy. This end-pit lake strategy is actually fairly commonly used to reclaim strip mining of coal in the States. The difference there is that they don't put tailings in them. This is the big question as to whether or not it's viable. In base metal mining they use end-pit lakes, but it's a totally different type of use. It's part of the reclamation strategy.
The tailings ponds you see on the leases now will not be there when the thing is done; that is my understanding. I'm not an engineer; I know nothing about how they're going to do that. All I'm trying to determine is the toxicity of the materials as one of the indications as to the viability of these systems.
:
Dr. Barker, in your testimony you said that researchers at the University of Alberta and the Alberta Research Council are leading one such research effort in dealing with some of the new seepage studies. Could you identify to us who some of those researchers are?
One of the things I'm not satisfied that we've done a thorough job of investigating, as a committee, is that we haven't had anybody from the reclamation side of things, a real expert on reclamation, testify before the committee.
Could either of you identify who you think could or should be appropriate? You've seen who has testified before the committee already, I'm sure, by reviewing our meetings. You don't have to answer right now, but if you could give it some thought and maybe get back to the committee with that, I would really like to hear from somebody along those lines.
Dr. Dixon, about fish, after your briefing.... A lot of your citations dealt with studies that dealt with Perca flavescens, which is yellow perch. They don't normally exist in rivers, so I'm assuming that these are in some of these test ponds where these things are being studied in a closed environment.
Dr. D. George Dixon: Yes.
Mr. Blaine Calkins: When we were up at Fort Chip we heard anecdotal evidence from the fishermen and the locals who were there. I asked some questions about diseases and so on.
You know what lymphocystic is.
Dr. D. George Dixon Yes.
Mr. Blaine Calkins: You know what dermal sarcoma is.
Dr. D. George Dixon: Yes.
Mr. Blaine Calkins: It's quite common in Stizostedion vitreum or the walleye populations and so on.
Do any of those diseases or any of those parasites cause deformations or abnormalities in fish?
:
I actually don't know how to answer that one, in some ways. The discomfort I have is not in the actual nature of the work that is being undertaken; the discomfort is in what I would call other areas that I know should be explored but for which there are not sufficient human resources, frankly, in the academic community in Canada to address all of the issues at the present time.
I have, on a number of occasions, made comments to individuals within the province of Alberta about what I think are the research needs in the oil sands. Two weeks ago, I gave a one-and-a-half-hour seminar to colleagues at Environment Canada, trying to encourage them to become involved to a greater extent in oil sands activity. I'm giving a web seminar to colleagues in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in about two weeks to outline some of what I feel are the issues.
A lot of this has to do with what I said earlier, that up until two or three years ago the level of interest in this was not what it is now. So I've often, frankly, undertaken to encourage colleagues to join me in working in the oil sands on different appropriate issues.
There is a consortium. Please understand that some of the papers I've reported here were done with colleagues from Environment Canada. There are people from the University of Guelph, the University of Windsor, the University of Saskatchewan, and the University of Alberta who have participated in this.
Now, have I made pitches in the media with respect to more money for oil sands work? No. I find, frankly, that as a research scientist that is a particularly ineffective way of trying to influence people to give you further resources. I would suggest that perhaps fora like these, or talking to people who are controlling research funding more directly, are more productive.
So it's not a discomfort with the science that is done in the majority of cases, particularly that which is done in a peer-reviewed fashion. It's a discomfort in that there are probably more questions that need to be asked than we're fully drawing our attention to at the present time.
A number of the questions I had have already been asked and answered.
I want to thank you for being here. This has been very enlightening. As has been shared, we took the trip. I've learned over the years that firsthand experience on the site is really edifying. It helps us to understand. It was good to hear that you'd been there many times yourself.
In my past life, I was on city council for about 14 years. Often we would go out to see the site. In the area around us we had some very large mounds of gravel that were removed, and then the area was reclaimed. The end result was an improvement on what was there before. You now have very productive agricultural land where previously it was great mounds of gravel. As you suggest, there are opportunities to improve.
One hurdle we dealt with in local government was the company that would maybe mine that resource. There was not adequate security to make sure it was reclaimed adequately.
My first question focuses on reclamation. Dr. Barker, I think you mentioned that if it's not designed properly, if it's not functioning properly, the province may not want it back. What guarantees are there that the work will be completed and that there will be security to make sure it's done properly and meets the province's standards?
Mr. Barker, I'd like to come back to the study conducted by your graduate students. It is mentioned on page 7 of the brief you presented. They analyzed three sectors where water contaminated by processes infiltrated groundwater.
In response to Mr. Woodworth, you confirmed what you had written in your report, and I quote:
The other two plumes created groundwater contamination on operator leases, which does not threaten surface water bodies.
That is basically what you told Mr. Woodworth. However, you added the following:
Unfortunately, the major toxicants, naphtenic acids, do not show significant biodegradation in these plumes. Attenuation appears to be by slow dilution with natural groundwater.
First, what then is the level of toxicity observed?
Second, when you talk about slow dilution, what do you mean by that?
Third, what are we then to conclude for the future, particularly with regard to that plume?