[R-G] National Geographic sparks mainstream reaction

[Anthony Fenton]

The article in question

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text
Published: March 2009
Scraping Bottom
Once considered too expensive, as well as too damaging to the land,  
exploitation of Alberta's oil sands is now a gamble worth billions.
By Robert Kunzig

One day in 1963, when Jim Boucher was seven, he was out working the  
trap line with his grandfather a few miles south of the Fort McKay  
First Nation reserve on the Athabasca River in northern Alberta. The  
country there is wet, rolling fen, dotted with lakes, dissected by  
streams, and draped in a cover of skinny, stunted trees—it's part of  
the boreal forest that sweeps right across Canada, covering more than  
a third of the country. In 1963 that forest was still mostly  
untouched. The government had not yet built a gravel road into Fort  
McKay; you got there by boat or in the winter by dogsled. The  
Chipewyan and Cree Indians there—Boucher is a Chipewyan—were  
largely cut off from the outside world. For food they hunted moose and  
bison; they fished the Athabasca for walleye and whitefish; they  
gathered cranberries and blueberries. For income they trapped beaver  
and mink. Fort McKay was a small fur trading post. It had no gas,  
electricity, telephone, or running water. Those didn't come until the  
1970s and 1980s.

In Boucher's memory, though, the change begins that day in 1963, on  
the long trail his grandfather used to set his traps, near a place  
called Mildred Lake. Generations of his ancestors had worked that  
trapline. "These trails had been here thousands of years," Boucher  
said one day last summer, sitting in his spacious and tasteful corner  
office in Fort McKay. His golf putter stood in one corner; Mozart  
played softly on the stereo. "And that day, all of a sudden, we came  
upon this clearing. A huge clearing. There had been no notice. In the  
1970s they went in and tore down my grandfather's cabin—with no  
notice or discussion." That was Boucher's first encounter with the oil  
sands industry. It's an industry that has utterly transformed this  
part of northeastern Alberta in just the past few years, with  
astonishing speed. Boucher is surrounded by it now and immersed in it  
himself.

Where the trapline and the cabin once were, and the forest, there is  
now a large open-pit mine. Here Syncrude, Canada's largest oil  
producer, digs bitumen-laced sand from the ground with electric  
shovels five stories high, then washes the bitumen off the sand with  
hot water and sometimes caustic soda. Next to the mine, flames flare  
from the stacks of an "upgrader," which cracks the tarry bitumen and  
converts it into Syncrude Sweet Blend, a synthetic crude that travels  
down a pipeline to refineries in Edmon ton, Alberta; Ontario, and the  
United States. Mildred Lake, meanwhile, is now dwarfed by its  
neighbor, the Mildred Lake Settling Basin, a four-square-mile lake of  
toxic mine tailings. The sand dike that contains it is by volume one  
of the largest dams in the world.

Nor is Syncrude alone. Within a 20-mile radius of Boucher's office are  
a total of six mines that produce nearly three-quarters of a million  
barrels of synthetic crude oil a day; and more are in the pipeline.  
Wherever the bitumen layer lies too deep to be strip-mined, the  
industry melts it "in situ" with copious amounts of steam, so that it  
can be pumped to the surface. The industry has spent more than $50  
billion on construction during the past decade, including some $20  
billion in 2008 alone. Before the collapse in oil prices last fall, it  
was forecasting another $100 billion over the next few years and a  
doubling of production by 2015, with most of that oil flowing through  
new pipelines to the U.S. The economic crisis has put many expansion  
projects on hold, but it has not diminished the long-term prospects  
for the oil sands. In mid-November, the International Energy Agency  
released a report forecasting $120-a-barrel oil in 2030—a price that  
would more than justify the effort it takes to get oil from oil sands.

Nowhere on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the  
Athabasca Valley. To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine,  
the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of  
two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two  
tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to  
strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it  
discharges contaminated water into tailings ponds like the one near  
Mildred Lake. They now cover around 50 square miles. Last April some  
500 migrating ducks mistook one of those ponds, at a newer Syncrude  
mine north of Fort McKay, for a hospitable stopover, landed on its  
oily surface, and died. The incident stirred international attention— 
Greenpeace broke into the Syncrude facility and hoisted a banner of a  
skull over the pipe discharging tailings, along with a sign that read  
"World's Dirtiest Oil: Stop the Tar Sands."

The U.S. imports more oil from Canada than from any other nation,  
about 19 percent of its total foreign supply, and around half of that  
now comes from the oil sands. Anything that reduces our dependence on  
Middle Eastern oil, many Americans would say, is a good thing. But  
clawing and cooking a barrel of crude from the oil sands emits as much  
as three times more carbon dioxide than letting one gush from the  
ground in Saudi Arabia. The oil sands are still a tiny part of the  
world's carbon problem—they account for less than a tenth of one  
percent of global CO2 emissions—but to many environmentalists they  
are the thin end of the wedge, the first step along a path that could  
lead to other, even dirtier sources of oil: producing it from oil  
shale or coal. "Oil sands represent a decision point for North America  
and the world," says Simon Dyer of the Pembina Institute, a moderate  
and widely respected Canadian environmental group. "Are we going to  
get serious about alternative energy, or are we going to go down the  
unconventional-oil track? The fact that we're willing to move four  
tons of earth for a single barrel really shows that the world is  
running out of easy oil."

That thirsty world has come crashing in on Fort McKay. Yet Jim  
Boucher's view of it, from an elegant new building at the entrance to  
the besieged little village, contains more shades of gray than you  
might expect. "The choice we make is a difficult one," Boucher said  
when I visited him last summer. For a long time the First Nation tried  
to fight the oil sands industry, with little success. Now, Boucher  
said, "we're trying to develop the community's capacity to take  
advantage of the opportunity." Boucher presides not only over this  
First Nation, as chief, but also over the Fort McKay Group of  
Companies, a community-owned business that provides services to the  
oil sands industry and brought in $85 million in 2007. Unemployment is  
under 5 percent in the village, and it has a health clinic, a youth  
center, and a hundred new three-bedroom houses that the community  
rents to its members for far less than market rates. The First Nation  
is even thinking of opening its own mine: It owns 8,200 acres of prime  
oil sands land across the river, right next to the Syncrude mine where  
the ducks died.

As Boucher was telling me all this, he was picking bits of meat from a  
smoked whitefish splayed out on his conference table next to a bank of  
windows that offered a panoramic view of the river. A staff member had  
delivered the fish in a plastic bag, but Boucher couldn't say where it  
had come from. "I can tell you one thing," he said. "It doesn't come  
from the Athabasca."

Without the river, there would be no oil sands industry. It's the  
river that over tens of millions of years has eroded away billions of  
cubic yards of sediment that once covered the bitumen, thereby  
bringing it within reach of shovels—and in some places all the way to  
the surface. On a hot summer day along the Athabasca, near Fort McKay  
for example, bitumen oozes from the riverbank and casts an oily sheen  
on the water. Early fur traders reported seeing the stuff and watching  
natives use it to caulk their canoes. At room temperature, bitumen is  
like molasses, and below 50°F or so it is hard as a hockey puck, as  
Canadians invariably put it. Once upon a time, though, it was light  
crude, the same liquid that oil companies have been pumping from deep  
traps in southern Alberta for nearly a century. Tens of millions of  
years ago, geologists think, a large volume of that oil was pushed  
northeastward, perhaps by the rise of the Rocky Mountains. In the  
process it also migrated upward, along sloping layers of sediment,  
until eventually it reached depths shallow and cool enough for  
bacteria to thrive. Those bacteria degraded the oil to bitumen.

The Alberta government estimates that the province's three main oil  
sands deposits, of which the Athabasca one is the largest, contain 173  
billion barrels of oil that are economically recoverable today. "The  
size of that, on the world stage—it's massive," says Rick George, CEO  
of Suncor, which opened the first mine on the Athabasca River in 1967.  
In 2003, when the Oil & Gas Journal added the Alberta oil sands to its  
list of proven reserves, it immediately propelled Canada to second  
place, behind Saudi Arabia, among oil-producing nations. The proven  
reserves in the oil sands are eight times those of the entire U.S.  
"And that number will do nothing but go up," says George. The Alberta  
Energy Resources and Conservation Board estimates that more than 300  
billion barrels may one day be recoverable from the oil sands; it puts  
the total size of the deposit at 1.7 trillion barrels.

Getting oil from oil sands is simple but not easy. The giant electric  
shovels that rule the mines have hardened steel teeth that each weigh  
a ton, and as those teeth claw into the abrasive black sand 24/7, 365  
days a year, they wear down every day or two; a welder then plays  
dentist to the dinosaurs, giving them new crowns. The dump trucks that  
rumble around the mine, hauling 400-ton loads from the shovels to a  
rock crusher, burn 50 gallons of diesel fuel an hour; it takes a  
forklift to change their tires, which wear out in six months. And  
every day in the Athabasca Valley, more than a million tons of sand  
emerges from such crushers and is mixed with more than 200,000 tons of  
water that must be heated, typically to 175°F, to wash out the gluey  
bitumen. At the upgraders, the bitumen gets heated again, to about  
900°F, and compressed to more than 100 atmospheres—that's what it  
takes to crack the complex molecules and either subtract carbon or add  
back the hydrogen the bacteria removed ages ago. That's what it takes  
to make the light hydrocarbons we need to fill our gas tanks. It takes  
a stupendous amount of energy. In situ extraction, which is the only  
way to get at around 80 percent of those 173 billion barrels, can use  
up to twice as much energy as mining, because it requires so much steam.

Most of the energy to heat the water or make steam comes from burning  
natural gas, which also supplies the hydrogen for upgrading. Precisely  
because it is hydrogen rich and mostly free of impurities, natural gas  
is the cleanest burning fossil fuel, the one that puts the least  
amount of carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere. Critics  
thus say the oil sands industry is wasting the cleanest fuel to make  
the dirtiest—that it turns gold into lead. The argument makes  
environmental but not economic sense, says David Keith, a physicist  
and energy expert at the University of Calgary. Each barrel of  
synthetic crude contains about five times more energy than the natural  
gas used to make it, and in much more valuable liquid form. "In  
economic terms it's a slam dunk," says Keith. "This whole thing about  
turning gold into lead—it's the other way around. The gold in our  
society is liquid transportation fuels."

Most of the carbon emissions from such fuels comes from the tailpipes  
of the cars that burn them; on a "wells-to-wheels" basis, the oil  
sands are only 15 to 40 percent dirtier than conventional oil. But the  
heavier carbon footprint remains an environmental—and public relations 
—disadvantage. Last June Alberta's premier, Ed Stelmach, announced a  
plan to deal with the extra emissions. The province, he said, will  
spend over $1.5 billion to develop the technology for capturing carbon  
dioxide and storing it underground—a strategy touted for years as a  
solution to climate change. By 2015 Alberta is hoping to capture five  
million tons of CO2 a year from bitumen upgraders as well as from coal- 
fired power plants, which even in Alberta, to say nothing of the rest  
of the world, are a far larger source of CO2 than the oil sands. By  
2020, according to the plan, the province's carbon emissions will  
level off, and by 2050 they will decline to 15 percent below their  
2005 levels. That is far less of a cut than scientists say is  
necessary. But it is more than the U.S. government, say, has committed  
to in a credible way.

One thing Stelmach has consistently refused to do is "touch the brake"  
on the oil sands boom. The boom has been gold for the provincial as  
well as the national economy; the town of Fort McMurray, south of the  
mines, is awash in Newfoundlanders and Nova Scotians fleeing  
unemployment in their own provinces. The provincial government has  
been collecting around a third of its revenue from lease sales and  
royalties on fossil fuel extraction, including oil sands—it was  
expecting to get nearly half this year, or $19 billion, but the  
collapse in oil prices since the summer has dropped that estimate to  
about $12 billion. Albertans are bitterly familiar with the boom-and- 
bust cycle; the last time oil prices collapsed, in the 1980s, the  
provincial economy didn't recover for a decade. The oil sands cover an  
area the size of North Carolina, and the provincial government has  
already leased around half that, including all 1,356 square miles that  
are minable. It has yet to turn down an application to develop one of  
those leases, on environmental or any other grounds.

 From a helicopter it's easy to see the indus try's impact on the  
Athabasca Valley. Within minutes of lifting off from Fort McMurray,  
heading north along the east bank of the river, you pass over Suncor's  
Millennium mine—the company's leases extend practically to the town.  
On a day with a bit of wind, dust plumes billowing off the wheels and  
the loads of the dump trucks coalesce into a single enormous cloud  
that obscures large parts of the mine pit and spills over its lip. To  
the north, beyond a small expanse of intact forest, a similar cloud  
rises from the next pit, Suncor's Steepbank mine, and beyond that lie  
two more, and across the river two more. One evening last July the  
clouds had merged into a band of dust sweeping west across the  
devastated landscape. It was being sucked into the updraft of a storm  
cloud. In the distance steam and smoke and gas flames belched from the  
stacks of the Syncrude and Suncor upgraders—"dark satanic mills"  
inevitably come to mind, but they're a riveting sight all the same.  
 From many miles away, you could smell the tarry stench. It stings  
your lungs when you get close enough.

 From the air, however, the mines fall away quickly. Skimming low over  
the river, startling a young moose that was fording a narrow channel,  
a government biologist named Preston McEachern and I veered northwest  
toward the Birch Mountains, over vast expanses of scarcely disturbed  
forest. The Canadian boreal forest covers two million square miles, of  
which around 75 percent remains undeveloped. The oil sands mines have  
so far converted over 150 square miles—a hundredth of a percent of  
the total area—into dust, dirt, and tailings ponds. Expansion of in  
situ extraction could affect a much larger area. At Suncor's Firebag  
facility, northeast of the Millennium mine, the forest has not been  
razed, but it has been dissected by roads and pipelines that service a  
checkerboard of large clearings, in each of which Suncor extracts  
deeply buried bitumen through a cluster of wells. Environmentalists  
and wildlife biolo gists worry that the widening fragmentation of the  
forest, by timber as well as mineral companies, endangers the woodland  
caribou and other animals. "The boreal forest as we know it could be  
gone in a generation without major policy changes," says Steve  
Kallick, director of the Pew Boreal Campaign, which aims to protect 50  
percent of the forest.

McEachern, who works for Alberta Environment, a provincial agency,  
says the tailings ponds are his top concern. The mines dump waste  
water in the ponds, he explains, because they are not allowed to dump  
waste into the Athabasca, and because they need to reuse the water. As  
the thick, brown slurry gushes from the discharge pipes, the sand  
quickly settles out, building the dike that retains the pond; the  
residual bitumen floats to the top. The fine clay and silt particles,  
though, take several years to settle, and when they do, they produce a  
yogurt-like goop—the technical term is "mature fine tailings"—that  
is contaminated with toxic chemicals such as naphthenic acid and  
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and would take centuries to dry  
out on its own. Under the terms of their licenses, the mines are  
required to reclaim it somehow, but they have been missing their  
deadlines and still have not fully reclaimed a single pond.

In the oldest and most notorious one, Suncor's Pond 1, the sludge is  
perched high above the river, held back by a dike of compacted sand  
that rises more than 300 feet from the valley floor and is studded  
with pine trees. The dike has leaked in the past, and in 2007 a  
modeling study done by hydrogeologists at the University of Waterloo  
estimated that 45,000 gallons a day of contaminated water could be  
reaching the river. Suncor is now in the process of reclaiming Pond 1,  
piping some tailings to another pond, and replacing them with gypsum  
to consolidate the tailings. By 2010, the company says, the surface  
will be solid enough to plant trees on. Last summer it was still a  
blot of beige mud streaked with black bitumen and dotted with orange  
plastic scarecrows that are supposed to dissuade birds from landing  
and killing themselves.

The Alberta government asserts that the river is not being contaminated 
—that anything found in the river or in its delta, at Lake Athabasca,  
comes from natural bitumen seeps. The river cuts right through the oil  
sands downstream of the mines, and as our chopper zoomed along a few  
feet above it, McEachern pointed out several places where the  
riverbank was black and the water oily. "There is an increase in a lot  
of metals as you move downstream," he said. "That's natural—it's  
weathering of the geology. There's mercury in the fish up at Lake  
Athabasca—we've had an advisory there since the 1990s. There are PAHs  
in the sediments in the delta. They're there because the river has  
eroded through the oil sands."

Independent scientists, to say nothing of people who live downstream  
of the mines in the First Nations' community of Fort Chipewyan, on  
Lake Athabasca, are skeptical. "It's inconceivable that you could move  
that much tar and have no effect," says Peter Hodson, a fish  
toxicologist at Queen's University in Ontario. An Environment Canada  
study did in fact show an effect on fish in the Steepbank River, which  
flows past a Suncor mine into the Athabasca. Fish near the mine,  
Gerald Tetreault and his colleagues found when they caught some in  
1999 and 2000, showed five times more activity of a liver enzyme that  
breaks down toxins—a widely used measure of exposure to pollutants— 
as did fish near a natural bitumen seep on the Steepbank.

"The thing that angers me," says David Schindler, "is that there's  
been no concerted effort to find out where the truth lies."

Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, was  
talking about whether people in Fort Chipewyan have already been  
killed by pollution from the oil sands. In 2006 John O'Connor, a  
family physician who flew in weekly to treat patients at the health  
clinic in Fort Chip, told a radio interviewer that he had in recent  
years seen five cases of cholangiocarcinoma—a cancer of the bile duct  
that normally strikes one in 100,000 people. Fort Chip has a  
population of around 1,000; statistically it was unlikely to have even  
one case. O'Connor hadn't managed to interest health authorities in  
the cancer cluster, but the radio interview drew wide attention to the  
story. "Suddenly it was everywhere," he says. "It just exploded."

Two of O'Connor's five cases, he says, had been confirmed by tissue  
biopsy; the other three patients had shown the same symptoms but had  
died before they could be biopsied. (Cholan giocarcinoma can be  
confused on CT scans with more common cancers such as liver or  
pancreatic cancer.) "There is no evidence of elevated cancer rates in  
the community," Howard May, a spokesperson for Alberta Health, wrote  
in an email last September. But the agency, he said, was nonetheless  
conducting a more complete investigation—this time actually examining  
the medical records from Fort Chip—to try to quiet a controversy that  
was now two years old.

One winter night when Jim Boucher was a young boy, around the time the  
oil sands industry came to his forest, he was returning alone by  
dogsled to his grandparents' cabin from an errand in Fort McKay. It  
was a journey of 20 miles or so, and the temperature was minus 4°F. In  
the moonlight Boucher spotted a flock of ptarmigan, white birds in the  
snow. He killed around 50, loaded them on the dogsled, and brought  
them home. Four decades later, sitting in his chief-executive office  
in white chinos and a white Adidas sport shirt, he remembers the pride  
on his grandmother's face that night. "That was a different spiritual  
world," Boucher says. "I saw that world continuing forever." He tells  
the story now when asked about the future of the oil sands and his  
people's place in it.

A poll conducted by the Pembina Institute in 2007 found that 71  
percent of Albertans favored an idea their government has always  
rejected out of hand: a moratorium on new oil sands projects until  
environmental concerns can be resolved. "It's my belief that when  
government attempts to manipulate the free market, bad things happen,"  
Premier Stelmach told a gathering of oil industry executives that  
year. "The free-market system will solve this."

But the free market does not consider the effects of the mines on the  
river or the forest, or on the people who live there, unless it is  
forced to. Nor, left to itself, will it consider the effects of the  
oil sands on climate. Jim Boucher has collaborated with the oil sands  
industry in order to build a new economy for his people, to replace  
the one they lost, to provide a new future for kids who no longer hunt  
ptarmigan in the moonlight. But he is aware of the trade-offs. "It's a  
struggle to balance the needs of today and tomorrow when you look at  
the environment we're going to live in," he says. In northern Alberta  
the question of how to strike that balance has been left to the free  
market, and its answer has been to forget about tomorrow. Tomorrow is  
not its job.