[R-G] OIL SANDS-PART 2: "Where I Come From Is Ground Zero"

[Anthony Fenton]

OIL SANDS-PART 2:  "Where I Come From Is Ground Zero"
By Chris Arsenault*

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44317

FT. MCMURRAY, Oct 17 (IPS) - The wheels of the Caterpillar 797B, the  
world's largest truck, are always going round and round at Shell  
Canada's Albian Sands mine.

The massive dump trucks, with wheels standing twice the size of a  
person and tires costing some 40,000 dollars apiece, carry tar sand 24  
hours a day, seven days a week.

"There isn't a lot of work in Newfoundland [a traditionally poor  
province on Canada's Atlantic coast], so you can do pretty well out  
here," Brian Paley, a mechanic who fixes and inspects the three-storey  
trucks, told IPS.

Paley says he enjoys the work; he earns a six-figure salary and the  
rugged northern Alberta landscape allows him to snowmobile in the  
winter and camp during the summer.

However, some natives living downstream from the operation say the tar  
sands are destroying ecosystems that give people like Brian Paley so  
much pleasure.

"We've lost 108 people since 1990, the elders say they buried one  
person per year in the old days," said Michael Mercredi, a member  
Athabasca Chipewyan/Dene First Nation from Fort Chipewayn, a community  
of some 1,200 aboriginals located downstream from the tar sands. Many  
community members died of rare cancers they blame on the tar sands.

Like many young people from Ft. Chipewayn, Mercredi knows the tar  
sands well; he spent four years making big money driving trucks at one  
of the mines. "I just walked off the job one night, I thought 'this is  
wrong, we're destroying our own land'," said Mercredi.

"Where I come from is ground zero," Mercredi, who now works gathering  
traditional knowledge from elders in the community, told IPS

Dr. John O'Connor, Ft. Chipewayn's former physician, catalogued a  
string of cases of cholangiocarcinoma, an uncommon cancer of the bile  
duct among members of the community. The disease normally strikes 1 in  
100,000 and Dr. O'Connor reported six cases in Ft. Chip over a short  
period, in addition to other strange ailments. He sent results to the  
local toxicologist's office. That's when the pro-industry Alberta  
government stepped in.



In 2006, Alberta Health and Wellness filed a complaint with the  
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, alleging that Dr.  
O'Connor had engendered mistrust and raised undue alarm in Ft.  
Chipewayn. O'Connor left Alberta for Nova Scotia while the College of  
Physicians investigated the charges. He was cleared of wrongdoing in  
2008 but decided not to return to Alberta.

"Dr. O'Connor was our martyr," said Mercredi. "He sacrificed part of  
his career to inform people about what was happening to us."

While the Chief of Ft. Chipewayn has spoken out vigorously about the  
social and environmental impacts of rapid tar sands expansion, other  
First Nations, including the Ft. Mackay Band, have embraced the mega- 
project because they say it brings jobs, money and development to the  
region.

Mercredi and other critics the of development say fish from the  
Athabasca River, which supplies water to the tar sands, are exhibiting  
strange deformities and mutations. In August, a group of children  
pulled a fish with two mouths from Lake Athabasca, near an area where  
tar sands tailings water had leached into the soil.

"One of the companies admitted to our community that a tailings pond  
was leaking into a stream," said Mercredi.

Elders from Ft. Chipewayn say the mutant fish is "a sign of what will  
happen to human life," according to testimony from a water conference  
held in the community in August.

Water is crucial for tar sands extraction: separating one barrel of  
oil from the sand requires at least three barrels of water.

According to peer-reviewed scientific articles written by Dr. David  
Schindler, Killam Memorial Chair and Professor of Ecology at the  
University of Alberta, the whole province and neighbouring regions  
will soon face "a crisis in water quantity and quality with far- 
reaching implications." Tar sands producers extract 2.5 million  
barrels of water per day from the Athabasca River.

Water becomes toxic during the oil extraction process and ends up in  
massive tailings ponds. In April, more than 400 ducks died after the  
flock landed on a tailings pond, owned by Syncrude, the largest tar  
sands consortium.

The largest tailings pond, controlled by Syncrude, contains 540  
million cubic metres of poison waste water, making it the second  
largest dam on earth, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.

"We are the most efficient user of water in the oil sands," said Steve  
Gaudet, the environmental manager for Syncrude, a joint venture  
between Imperial Oil, ConocoPhillips, Petro Canada, Nexen and several  
smaller players.

During a tour of Syncrude's main site, Gaudet told IPS that the  
consortium will eventually be able to "reclaim" the tailings water,  
making it safe again, by mixing tailings with fresh water and gypsum,  
so the water becomes a solid.

"The industry has not demonstrated the ability to reclaim tailings  
ponds," countered Simon Dyer from the Pembina Institute.

In March, the government of Alberta issued the first land reclamation  
certificate for a tar sands operator to Syncrude, for successfully  
reclaiming a 104-hectare parcel known as Gateway Hill. The company  
frequently showcases the area to visitors. A herd of bison graze  
nearby as Syncrude employees pass around boxed lunches to a delegation  
of journalists touring the area.

But, according to the Pembina Institute's Simon Dyer, Gateway Hill  
"isn't representative of the challenge industry is facing" because the  
area is "just topsoil that was stripped away" in previous decades.  
Over the long term, Dyer says the companies have to incorporate poison  
tailings into a dry landscape, and they have not proven their ability  
to do so.

While the gargantuan trucks trolling the land at Syncrude and Albian  
Sands can leave sceptical journalists in awe, they are not the most  
important tool for tar sands extraction. Roughly 20 percent of the oil  
here in northern Alberta can be extracted through surface mining; the  
rest requires underground techniques know as in-situ.

These underground techniques disturb less surface land, but critics  
say they are particularly energy intensive and wasteful. The energy  
equivalent of one barrel of oil is required to produce three barrels  
of oil from the tar sands, according to the Pembina Institute's Dan  
Woynillowicz.

Cyclic steam stimulation, colloquially referred to as "huff and puff",  
is one popular in-situ method where oil companies blast steam into  
underground bitumen deposits through pipes for a month at a time. Once  
the bitumen is hot enough, other pipes will suck the oil back up to  
the surface.

Michael Mercredi says that First Nations are in a unique position to  
slow or stop tar sands development, but that doesn't seem likely in  
Alberta's current political climate. If anything will slow the world's  
largest industrial project, and its voracious appetite for water and  
land, it will likely be factors far away from this province's muskeg  
flatlands.

While most oil company officials are mum on exact figures, it is  
estimated that extracting one barrel of oil from the tar sands costs  
between 25-35 dollars. If the world economy hits a prolonged recession  
and the price of oil drops below 50 dollar a barrel, investors may  
look away from the tar sands.

Without a major recession, or political changes in United States, the  
largest consumer of tar sands crude, it seems likely that Caterpillar  
797Bs will continue hauling oil 24/7, regardless of the environmental  
costs.

*This is the second of a three-part series investigating the  
political, environmental and social impacts of Canada's oil sands  
development. Chris Arsenault holds the 2008/09 Phil Lind Fellowship at  
the University of British Columbia. A portion of his visit to Alberta  
was minded and financed by Shell Canada.