:
Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk to you a little about, and to hear your questions about, water and the oil sands projects.
There are two main aspects to which I have given some study. One is the question of groundwater. That was done through the Expert Panel on Groundwater management in Canada, put in place by the Council of Canadian Academies. I think you have been sent copies of at least sections of that report. If you haven't received them, we'd be happy to provide you with copies of the Report in Focus—the short version of the report—in both official languages.
The other thing I would like to discuss is some earlier work I did from 2006 to 2008 for WWF Canada on trends in the flow of the Athabasca River and what they mean for water availability for the oil sands.
So if you give me enough time, I will try to cover both of these issues.
I'm sure you've had several other presentations, so you will be aware that the in situ recovery of bitumen at levels below about 75 metres is undertaken by steam injection to soften the bitumen and then to pump it back up to the surface. That steam injection, of course, requires water, and it's usually groundwater that's used. As for the amounts, they originally hoped it would in the order of half a barrel of water per barrel of recovered oil, but it now looks as if it's going to be substantially more than those values. It's very hard to get a good estimate. The original hope was also that they'd be able to use saline groundwater, but there are apparently some real problems with what to do with the salt when they take the water out of the ground. So they are using substantial quantities of natural groundwater.
In reviewing 11 case studies—eight in Canada and three in the United States—to get an idea of how sustainable our management of groundwater is, the panel selected a number of places across the country. One of them was the oil sands.
We relied heavily on the work of the Alberta Research Council in coming to our conclusions about the oil sands. Those appear on page 148 of our report. The questions that the Alberta Research Council raised in 2007 have not, to date, been satisfactorily answered—although, as I understand it, there is some motion towards getting some answers.
Let me review briefly what the Alberta Research Council said. They said that there was a whole bunch of unanswered questions.
How do low-flow levels in the Athabasca River affect shallow groundwater, and how does aquifer dewatering in the mine areas affect surface water systems?
What are the effects of increased mining activities on changing land cover or the effects of the diversion of groundwater out of mined areas on groundwater recharge?
How will changes in water quality resulting from aquifer disturbance and tailings pond leakage affect the quality of groundwater and surface water resources?
What data are required to assess the claim that deep injection of steam and waste does not negatively impact the regional and local aquifer systems? And are those data available?
What are the regional threshold objectives to ensure sustainable groundwater management?
And last, do planned developments have adverse impacts on water in adjoining jurisdictions, that is, the Northwest Territories and Saskatchewan, and on downstream ecosystems?
The panel concluded that those projects had gone ahead with a completely inadequate understanding of the groundwater regime in the area, and they are having significant impacts on the groundwater regime.
We used it as an example to try to illustrate the fact that it's very important to get the basic information on groundwater before you move ahead with projects that can have a significant influence on the groundwater.
So we considered it a pretty unsustainable situation. We could talk about that later, if you wish.
Now to turn to the Athabasca River as a source water mainly for the surface mining operations...and this involves scraping off of the bitumen, along with the peat and the trees and the near-surface groundwater, down to about 75 metres, which is fairly deep. In this case, we do know that each barrel of bitumen consumes an average of three barrels of freshwater, mainly from the river. This strip mining operation also changes the shallow groundwater interchanges with the river, and has even obliterated some small tributary watersheds and one-half of the large 1,500-square kilometre Muskeg Creek watershed. It's projected that as projects move to heavier clay deposits, even more water will be needed to recover the bitumen.
Let's take water quantity first. Water quantity and quality are the two issues. In the water-taking permits that have been given, the amounts allocated for oil sands projects appear to have been based—I reviewed a couple of the environmental impact statements—on a percentage of the long-term mean annual flow of the river, ignoring the fact that the flow of the river has been declining for the last 35 years due to shrinkage of the Athabasca Glacier by 25% and due to increased evapotranspiration in the basin as the water runs from the east slopes in the long trek across Alberta towards the oil sands. They're sometimes cited by industry as 2.2% of long-term average flows, but that's a meaningless figure. The water scientists around the world now believe that stationarity is dead. By this they mean that the amounts of water we've seen in rivers and lakes in the past is no indication of what we're going to see in the future because of the changing climate.
So using an average flow over a long period of time has two serious flaws. One is that the winter flows are much less than the summer, ten times or more less than the summer and spring flows, and it's the winter flows that are critical in protecting ecosystems in the river. The trends have been quite remarkable, as in some other rivers in southern parts of Canada. Average summer flows have declined 33% since 1970 and the minimum flows in winter, which is more worrisome, have declined by 27% in the most recent decade compared to the decade of the seventies.
These trends are bound to continue and may accelerate because of the decline in the glacier that feeds the river and the headwaters, the Athabasca Glacier, and acceleration of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases were going up about 1.6 parts per million per year up until 2000. Since 2000 they've been going up at 1.9 parts per million per year.
Now, it's possible that the current economic downturn will give a little blip, but I don't think it's going to last for long. I think we're on a path towards much more rapid increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere because of increased emissions.
The drought in the early 2000s that helped cause the decline in flow was quite modest compared to past droughts, according to tree ring analysis, and is likely to be a very modest drought compared to future droughts if the climate change projections are anywhere close to right.
The winter flows are the lowest of the year, and Alberta has begun to recognize the importance of trying to maintain those flows in the winter. Their allocations to date don't take that into account. They've now developed a scheme to reduce the amount of water the oil sands projects take in the winter months to try to protect ecosystems. But if you look at the data, this means that in a typical year in the last little while, the oil sands projects would have only half of the water they say they're going to need with full development of the oil sands. If it's a very acute situation, they would have only about one third of the water they've projected they will need in the future for full development.
You have to recognize that only about 10% of the water withdrawn is returned to the river, since it becomes too polluted in the processing to do so. It's dumped into these huge tailing ponds or lakes that now cover 50 square kilometres or more. These lakes have high concentrations of toxic naphthenic acids and other contaminants, as many migratory birds have discovered. They also mobilize arsenic from natural sources in the watershed through the processes being used.
While reliable data are difficult to obtain because there is a lack of independent monitoring in the system, a presentation in Houston in 2007 indicated that these contaminants are seeping into groundwater and occurring in the sediments of the river already.
You have to recognize that the Athabasca is the most southern tributary of the Mackenzie River basin, and flows northward into the Arctic. The impacts of oil sands takings or water takings, both groundwater and surface water, on the flows of the Athabasca River northward into the Mackenzie have not really been taken into account.
My personal recommendation to you is that the federal government try to help ensure that under the Mackenzie basin agreement, negotiations are completed on a binding water-sharing and water quality protection agreement between Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, B.C., and the Yukon.
Secondly, the Government of Alberta should consider withholding approval of any additional oil sands projects and related water-taking licences until the most critical of these issues raised by the Alberta Research Council are really addressed, and substantial water conservation measures are implemented in the project. I've heard that Suncor has reduced its water demand by about 30%. Let's get them all doing that, for goodness' sake.
Assurances also need to be made that the in-stream flow needs can be met to protect ecosystems and public health in the lower Athabasca, in the face of the changing climate and the declining flow of the Athabasca River. The companies need to reduce their water demands through a number of processes, which they know a lot more about than I do.
Since the oil sands projects are likely to be most adversely affected by climate change, they should redouble their efforts or make strong efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions so they aren't contributing to the problem that will affect them in the very near future, and that is affecting them now.
The other thing is that we're looking at the water, but emissions from the developments into the atmosphere have effects on water downwind in Saskatchewan and in the Northwest Territories through airborne transport of pollutants such as acid rain and other things.
Those are my suggestions for improved federal involvement in this project.
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
As you mentioned, my name is Mark Corey and I am assistant deputy minister, Earth Sciences Sector at the Department of Natural Resources. I am accompanied by Mr. David Boerner, director general of the Geological Survey of Canada, and Mr. Alfonso Rivera, who is an expert and program manager of our Ground Water Program.
[English]
I'm going to just give you a brief overview, and then David has a deck that he can take you through.
Our focus really is on water as it moves underground in Canada, and particularly larger-scale aquifers. We'd like to give you a brief overview of the NRCan groundwater geoscience program to talk about the context in which we work.
To start off, we believe groundwater is a critical resource. That's our starting point. We understand groundwater. When water moves underground, actually, it's really the geologists who understand it. So that's what we at the Geological Survey do. We study water as it moves underground.
In Canada we've identified 30 major national aquifers. There are a lot of other smaller ones, but those are the critical ones. We've done what we would call a reconnaissance preliminary assessment of all of those aquifers. Now we're doing a much more in-depth, detailed analysis of each one. We've completed the in-depth analysis on 12 of those 30, and we're accelerating the work on the rest.
Just to give you an idea, we were spending about $3 million a year. We've now accelerated that by an internal reallocation of resources and we're spending about $3.9 million a year.
Our goal is to have a comprehensive and consistent evidence base across Canada of how these aquifers work and behave under different conditions and scenarios. We work very closely with the provinces and territories and with all the other provincial actors and academia. It really is a shared responsibility. One of our principal roles is national overview and standards for this.
[Translation]
I would like to introduce you to Mr. David Boerner, who will be making the presentation. First, he will talk to you about groundwater in Canada and then he will give you an overview of our work, particularly in Alberta.
:
So you have a deck in front of you. Slide 2 actually shows what we are going to talk about quickly. It is an overview of what we know about aquifers in Canada, the key aquifers, the large ones. As Mark said, we have identified 30 that we're studying in great detail, but there are literally hundreds of aquifers in Canada. We'll focus on the regional picture.
We'll talk briefly about what we need to add to our understanding to achieve this goal of sustainable management and sustainable use of groundwater resources, and then give you a snapshot of what the groundwater studies are that we've been doing, which are pertinent to the Alberta situation. Several of the questions you've already raised. I hope we'll come back to that particular topic.
Slide 3 shows the graph of Canada. It shows the map of Canada with key hydrogeological regions in Canada. Precipitation patterns and geography control some of that. Marked on there are a bunch of circles that show the generalized location of the 30 aquifers we've identified as key.
All 30 of these aquifers have had a preliminary assessment where we've looked at whatever existing data there is about the aquifers and we've tried to assess what we can tell about those aquifer systems. This data, of course, is a bit spotty. It was collected by different people in different times and different eras, but it does give us a preliminary sense of where the aquifers are, how they work, and what the geology is.
We're systematically going through these trying to do a much more complete assessment. I'll show you a summary of a couple of pages of what is in that more complete assessment, but the ones we have completed on here are marked in green. The ones we have yet to do are still a white circle.
Twelve have been assessed in greater detail, and we're trying to understand the groundwater availability, the dynamics of the aquifer; as you've already heard, water is constantly in motion and the real challenge of some of these aquifers is understanding those dynamics—it's not so much just locating where they are—and the potential vulnerabilities of those aquifers to contamination or disturbance or overuse.
As Mark said, we are accelerating our efforts to do this. We had thought we would try to finish these by 2030 with the resources we had. We've now taken five years off that schedule by allocating more resources to this, so we're taking steps to try to move faster because we certainly recognize how important this is to Canadians. About 10 million Canadians depend on groundwater as the potable water supply.
Slide 4 shows what kind of information we can expect from existing aquifers in this preliminary assessment that we've already done of all 30. We know something about the basic geological setting. We know something about the depth and location. This is an interesting issue. A lot of people think aquifers are like underground lakes or underground rivers. They are not. They are probably more akin to something like sponges, where water is distributed everywhere inside them. It is sometimes a real challenge to ask where the boundaries of these things are and where the water is contained.
The other thing about aquifers that people don't appreciate is the time that water takes to move through them. It can range from tens of years to hundreds of years, even thousands of years. So if you cause a disturbance in one part of an aquifer, it may be a long time before you have any knowledge of it occurring someplace else in the aquifer. When you ask how long it takes to study one of these things, if the water movement is hundreds of years, it is a real challenge to figure out what the aquifer is doing in just a couple of years of study.
We also know something about withdrawal rates, because most of the information we have about existing aquifers comes from existing water wells. These were drilled by individuals, often, or corporations, or by different companies. They don't have consistent records or always complete records, but we do have some information about what is happening.
We know, in many cases, the basic water chemistry. Actually, I think we can say that Canada is quite fortunate that the water quality of groundwater is, for the most part, excellent in many places.
We know something about the probable recharge and discharge areas. So we know how water gets into the aquifers in a general sense and we know something about how it comes out.
But that's about it. That's an overview summary.
This is a preliminary assessment, so there's quite a bit known. If you look at slide 5, though, what we really want to do is try to understand how the aquifer functions. This is a whole different question. We need to be a lot more systematic about understanding the dimensions of the aquifer, where the water is, how it's moving, and what the particular draws on the water might be from different places where people are withdrawing it.
Here is a list--I'm not going to go through it--that shows, in comparison to previous lists, that much more comprehensive data is needed. One of the problems that we've certainly had in Canada is that the history of studying groundwater has been scattered among a whole bunch of jurisdictions. People do things differently in different places, and one of the activities we're certainly going to take is to try to consolidate and coordinate some of that so we have much more consistent and comprehensive information.
Slide 6 reiterates that point. This is definitely a collaborative effort. We often work very closely with the provinces and municipalities to try to get, between us, all the information we need. Often the federal government doesn't have much of the information. It's really the provinces that have the management responsibilities, and often the municipalities that have a lot of the detailed information.
So we work quite hard at a collaboration to make sure everybody is sharing information and we all know what it means. Collectively, in doing this, we're establishing common approaches.
One of the real strengths of this program is due to Dr. Rivera. His vision sort of came out in 2001 that we needed to have a very comprehensive way of doing this and that everybody should be doing it roughly the same way, because water does move. It's our only natural resource that crosses boundaries all the time. If you have different approaches on two different sides of a boundary, then you've got incompatible data and you can't even begin to make policy.
The other thing we're doing as part of this program, which I think is key, is trying to create a groundwater information network. This is a completely distributed database system. Nobody holds all the information, but it's all accessible by everybody else. We're not trying to amass everything into a huge database; we're just trying to say that if it's available, then everybody should be able to get the information they need whenever they need it. It's really a question of linking things together.
Slide 7, I understand, is one of your primary interests--some of the aquifer systems in Alberta. Because aquifers are more like sponges than they are like lakes, it's actually very hard to depict them on maps, so this is a very schematic map. It shows the general locations of some of the key aquifers in Alberta. Of course, there are many more than are shown on here, but these are some of the ones we've identified as part of our list. I'll take you through the list starting at the top.
The Paskapoo sandstones is one of the major aquifers in Alberta. It sort of runs between Calgary and Edmonton. This is a primary focus of the Alberta Geological Survey and the Alberta environment department, because this supplies an awful lot of water to population centres in Alberta. This is something we just completed an assessment of with the Alberta groups, so it's now fairly complete.
The second thing we're focusing on now is the buried valley aquifers, which is “BV” on this graphic. These are paleovalleys. They are actually valleys that existed at one time but were since infilled by sediment. Because there were sediments put into these things--sediments are more porous, and let water run through them--the valleys still take a lot of water through them, but they're buried underneath the rock.
These are actually best thought of as a bunch of channels that run across the region and they're quite large in area of extent. This is of particular interest around the oil sands because they occupy a lot of the same area, as you can see.
This is something we're currently working on with Alberta and Saskatchewan, because these buried paleovalleys actually extend to Saskatchewan, and I believe some of them extend into Manitoba. They're quite large areas, and we're in discussions right now with Alberta and Saskatchewan about how they're best studied. They are huge systems and we can't understand the whole thing, but we want to understand the critical parts of it. We should complete the assessment of that aquifer system by about 2012.
There are three other sets of aquifers marked on the map, which currently aren't on our schedule to do in the next three years. They'll be prioritized in a different way. We still feel they're important, but they're not as critical in terms of timeliness as the buried paleovalleys.
We'd be remiss if we didn't mention our Alberta colleagues. They have a fairly proactive and forward-looking groundwater strategy that they started in 2007. They have started a 10-year plan to understand groundwater across the province. Their aquifer mapping process and progress is completely compatible with what we're doing. As we complete this inventory of 30, what they'll be doing in their program will add to that inventory and potentially speed up our access to completing all 30. The first area they are really focusing on is more in the Edmonton-Calgary corridor, but they're doing an awful lot of work around the oil sands as well, as I'm sure you're quite aware.
In summary of where we are with our program, as Mark said, we believe groundwater is a critical resource, and we're trying to get the information into people's hands so they can make sustainable management decisions. Lack of information is the real problem. We're doing this collectively with everybody who has a stake in groundwater management in Canada, because we really think collective leadership is what's going to allow us to have comprehensive, consistent data across the country. Our ultimate goal is that people do assessments of aquifers in a way in which information can be shared and contained. One of our challenges is that they do connect with surface water. They do connect across boundaries, including boundaries with the United States. Having a comprehensive database allows much more sound policy decisions.
At this point, we'd be quite happy to try to answer your questions.
:
Why, thank you, Mr. Chair.
I certainly appreciate having an opportunity to ask some questions of our panel here. I certainly appreciate the testimony I've heard so far. It's been quite enlightening.
I worked for a number of years for Environment Canada. I also worked for Alberta Environment in a different capacity. Basically, I was one of the cogs in the wheel who was constantly doing surface water samples and so on. So we do have lots of those inventories. I was taking samples, whether it was potable water at a park or water from a lake that I happened to be working near, and so on.
You made reference to Alberta's “Water for Life” strategy, which is the one that started in 2007 and goes out for 10 years. I was on a municipal council in Alberta, and when you look at Alberta, there's a large move to go away from groundwater or aquifer use to regional water and waste water systems. The town I live in, for example, along with several other partnering communities, is now using or drawing water from the Red Deer River, which is a non-glacier-fed river. We found immediately that the aquifers we were drawing down—we would notice a steady decline—have now almost completely recharged within a year and a half, or much faster than we had anticipated or the engineers had suggested the aquifers would recharge. So I thought that was quite interesting.
When you take something like that, where make a best guess, and we apply it to what's happening in, let's say, the oil sands.... You guys know what the geology is. We know where the formations are. We know where the water is and, to a certain degree, how that water moves through there. So when we're going through that whole process, what are the unknowns that we need to know? We're going to go through this study—Ms. Duncan referred to it—and I think it's going to take time to tackle these things.
Now, I've heard stories. I've talked to people who have gone out into the Paskapoo area, where they've actually put dyes in the water. They monitored where the dyes ended up, so they could trace where these waters moved through the aquifers, and so on.
How much more do we need to know, in your opinion, before we can at least be comfortable knowing that when we issue permits or licences for development, we can be relatively sure we're doing the right thing? How far away are we from that?
:
I cannot speak on behalf of Alberta, but I can tell you from the point of view of hydrogeology and science and the experience we have with our program.
I think I can wrap up your question in three points.
This applies mostly everywhere, but particularly in the Athabasca oil sands, we need, and they need--we all need--to specify very clearly what is the sustainable safe yield off those aquifers. What I mean by that is what is the exact amount that can be sustainably extracted without affecting anything else around it?
It would be very technical to explain, but think about a reservoir where you have water running into it and you have water running out of it. You have to know the exact amount of the lame d'eau that you can extract without having adverse effects. That is not known. We call it the sustainable safe yield.
The second thing that is very important to learn is transport mechanisms. I also heard earlier this morning a question about the groundwater contaminated all the way to Yukon. That is a very tough question, but one about which I can say we do not know what other transport mechanism...because groundwater carries contaminants in very different ways: advection, dispersion, diffusion, and many different ways. The issues there are scales of time. You may have groundwater contamination that is stuck, that doesn't move, because of the different mechanical dispersion, etc.
The third thing, which we still do not know about very in-depth, are the surface water and groundwater connections. Given the geological nature of the buried valleys in the Athabasca area, sometimes they simply cross the river. They “outcrop”, let me say. This means that parts of the Athabasca and some other minor rivers also capture groundwater. In fact, if you measure sometimes the flow rate of the rivers, part of it is what we call the base flow. The base flow--even in the absence of rain, the river continues flowing--is in fact groundwater. Some of the amount of the buried valleys goes into the river. Not everything; they have mapped 27 buried channels in the Athabasca area.
So what I mean by surface water and groundwater interaction is that you need extensive monitoring to precisely evaluate what is the discharge--not the recharge, but the discharge--to the river.
If I go to the first point, sustainable yield, most people think that sustainable use of groundwater is to take the recharge and not pump more than the recharge. Sorry, but that's wrong. In fact, it's the discharge that counts, because the recharge is very slow. You may take 10 years or more before the aquifer is fully recharged again; don't forget, water is a cycle every year. However, in terms of the discharge, when you pump groundwater out, in fact what you are extracting is the discharge. In other words, if you extract more than what is discharging somewhere and you don't want to cause any effect, then you have to learn that.
So it's not the recharge. The recharge is important, of course, but you also have to understand; it's both the recharge and the--
:
Yes. Hydrogeology has evolved, as well, in the last 30 to 35 years. It went from being a qualitative type of geological branch to a more quantitative physical, or chemical, hydrogeology.
We have the tools. We understand the processes better. One thing is having the tools, knowing the processes and mechanisms. The other thing is collecting the data you need to assess a given aquifer.
All that is to say that I think the consequences, as you call them, could be enormous. So far, what we have learned from the aquifers we have mapped is that most of the aquifers in Canada are in pre-development conditions, meaning that they don't have a long-term transient effect yet. But that does not apply to every aquifer. Some do. An example is the buried channel type in Estevan between Saskatchewan and Montana. That behaviour we never suspected would happen, because it takes much longer to recover after pumping than we thought. That's one thing. Another thing is that we learn from other studies elsewhere in North America, such as from the United States.
Two consequences can also happen, depending on the type of rock. If you have a certain amount of groundwater, and the aquifer is located between clays with some compressibility, what you may have is land subsidence, les tassements. The ground collapses, so you have land subsidence, as we have seen already in California, Houston, and elsewhere.
A third consequence, which is also sometimes very important, is saltwater intrusion. You go into aquifers that are around the coastlines, and if you pump the freshwater in the aquifers, you may induce salt water from the sea into the aquifer, so you contaminate it. What we have observed that is interesting in Canada is that we may have saltwater intrusion not on the coastline but within the continent. That's very interesting.
:
Yes. Most of them are regionally scaled. We have observed that they are in pre-development conditions, meaning that they are not over-exploited.
Second, we also observed that in most of the cases, for domestic, agricultural, and industrial use, people are using mostly the upper 200 metres--I would even say 150 metres--of depth.
Third, we also have observed that the recharge for most of them, the recharge in the cycle of every year, is in the order of 30% to 40% of precipitation. In some cases, we were a bit surprised. We have observed that the recharge can be as high as 60%, as it is in some cases of aquifers in British Columbia.
Another aspect we have observed is that the quality of groundwater is excellent. It is, we believe, as in cases in Quebec, still untouched, so to speak, by anthropogenic effects.
But again, I must emphasize that we are working on a regional scale. As you go to a scale that is perhaps a municipality, or rural in some cases, that is perhaps something different. At a higher scale, this is what we see.