[R-G] Conference explores far-flung impacts of Alberta’s tar sands

[Anthony Fenton]

Week of November 20, 2008, Issue #683
FRONT
Everyone’s Downstream II: Tar sands, USA
Conference explores far-flung impacts of Alberta’s tar sands
http://www.vueweekly.com/article.php?id=10270
Scott Harris / scott at vueweekly.com
They are stories that by now are all too familiar to Albertans. In  
one, First Nations groups worried about the health impacts of tar  
sands operations on their people, who are experiencing a rash of  
cancers in a small population, are desperately trying to compel both  
industry and government to take their claims seriously. Another sees  
community groups questioning the air and water quality in their  
communities facing off against the expansion of an upgrader in an  
already-heavily-industrialized corridor.

While the storylines could be coming out of the northern Albertan  
community of Fort Chipewyan or the upgrader hearings in the Industrial  
Heartland northeast of Edmonton, these are emerging from locales south  
of the 49th parallel that most Albertans don’t consider when they  
think about the impacts of the tar sands: Ponca, Oklahoma and Whiting,  
Indiana, just two stops on an increasingly continental grid of  
pipelines and upgraders being prepared to handle northern Alberta’s  
bounty of bitumen.

“We have on our reservation, on our Ponca land in north-central  
Oklahoma, a ConocoPhillips refinery which has been here for over 50  
years,” explains Casey Camp-Hornik, a member of the Ponca Nation who  
works with the Coyote Creek Center for Environmental Justice. “One of  
the areas that they are beginning to explore—actually that they’re  
actively involved in—is the extraction of petroleum products from the  
oil sands in Canada and it being refined at this facility.”

It’s part of a $7 billion expansion plan by ConocoPhillips which,  
according to the Center for Media and Democracy’s Source Watch, will  
see the company refining tar sands oil at the Ponca facility and three  
other refineries by 2013. ConocoPhillips, the third largest energy  
company in the US, also has a stake in TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline  
projects which, when completed, will have the capacity to ship as much  
as 1.1 million barrels per day from Hardisty, Alberta to upgraders as  
far as the US Gulf Coast.

Plans to upgrade tar sands oil on Ponca land worry Camp-Hornik, who  
says that her nation is reeling from the pipelines, refineries and  
other industrial development that already surround them.

“We are saturated, we’re beyond saturation, with the pollution from  
that already. We have an extraordinarily high cancer rate, our  
groundwater is poisoned, the air from the refinery has toxic qualities  
to it and the earth itself, we’re not capable of growing anything on  
it anymore.

“We’re having a funeral a week and there’s probably 800 of us that  
live locally,” she continues, the frustration audible in her voice,  
“and I would say over 90 per cent of those are cancers.”

Despite what Camp-Hornik says her community is experiencing, there is  
little public outcry and no response from either the company or  
government to their claims.

“They simply say, ‘How do you prove it?’ And it’s very difficult. If  
you bring people with cancers to them and say, ‘They have lung cancer,  
they have respiratory systems that are ruined, they have heart  
problems,’ they’re like, ‘Well, does anybody in the family smoke  
cigarettes?’ Well, in the State of Oklahoma, unless you can visibly  
track a moat crossing that chainlink fence and arriving into your home  
it doesn’t count. So we’re having the state turn a blind eye, and the  
federal government has always, always failed to meet its trust  
responsibility to the native people.”

Like Camp-Hornik and a range of other activists and community members  
from across Canada and the United States, Steve Kozel is heading to  
Edmonton to share his story at the second Everyone’s Downstream  
conference, being held this weekend by the group Oil Sands Truth.

Kozel is the president of the Calumet Project, a labour-church- 
community coalition in Whiting, Indiana currently fighting plans by BP  
for a $3.8 billion expansion to its refinery on Lake Michigan to allow  
it to process heavy crude from the tar sands into gasoline, diesel and  
jet fuel by 2011.

A permit for the expansion—and increased pollution levels—was granted  
in May 2008, but the Calumet Project and other organizations are vying  
to stop the project from going ahead, challenging whether the permit  
issued for the expansion is valid.

“We have some concerns about water quality. That really kind of raised  
this issue here,” Kozel explains. “The thing with water, water you can  
see and if water changes colour we know something’s wrong with it. Air  
we breathe, and if it smells a little we know something’s wrong, but  
as far as all the other pollutants in there it’s very difficult to  
say. The air we breathe still looks clear, so how do we know what  
particulates are in there?

In July, the Chicago Tribune revealed that the refinery already  
exceeds pollution limits on its eight existing flare stacks, a problem  
which would be exacerbated when three more are added as part of the  
expansion to enable tar sands crude to be upgraded.

Kozel says groups like his are working to educate people in the area  
about what the expansion will mean for the environment in a region  
long-dominated by industry, and thinks connecting with other groups  
from around North America who are in similar straits related to the  
tar sands will help.

“You had the little crisis here where the price of gas went way up.  
And some people think, ‘Wow, that’s great that they can go ahead and  
refine and make oil out of sand.’ It’s like the lead-into-gold type of  
deal,” he says.

“I think a lot of them don’t realize the effect that this is going to  
have, because Indiana does not have any restrictions on greenhouse  
gas. And this is something we’re trying to explain—what the problems  
are going to be in the long run with this. Everyone just thinks  
they’re expanding the refinery and the majority of the people don’t  
really understand the long-term effects of what this tar sands  
refining is going to have.” V


Fri, Nov 22 & Sat, Nov 23 (9 am - 5 pm)
Everyone’s Downstream II
Edmonton Native Friendship Centre (11205 - 101 St)
Admission by donation, Free - $35, No one turned away for lack of funds
visit oilsandstruth.org for full schedule and details