EVIDENCE

Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development NUMBER 020 2nd SESSION 40th PARLIAMENT Tuesday, May 12, 2009 Le mardi 12 mai 2009 Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development CANADA [Recorded by Electronic Apparatus] EVIDENCE May 12, 2009 Committee Edited Evidence * Table of Contents * Number 020 (Official Version) Official Report * Table of Contents * Number 020 (Official Version) Témoignages * Table des matières * Numéro 020 (Version officielle) 20 12 05 2009 2009/05/12 08:15:00 House of Commons Comité permanent de l'environnement et du développement durable Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development ENVI Chair Mr. James Bezan 40 2

(0805) [ English ]

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia (Lac-Saint-Louis, Lib.)) :

Welcome, everyone, to this more or less first formal hearing as part of our trip out west to study the oil sands and their impact on water. I'd like to welcome our first two witnesses, Dr. Selma Guigard, who's an associate professor in the environmental engineering program at the University of Alberta; and Dr. Murray Gray, who is a professor at the University of Alberta. We'll start with a ten-minute presentation from each witness, and then we'll proceed to our usual round of questioning. Who would like to go first?

Dr. Murray R. Gray (Professor, University of Alberta, As an Individual) :

Thank you, Mr. Vice-Chair. I'm delighted to be able to meet with the committee this morning. I'm in perfect position to follow your tour of the oil sands yesterday, as well as your meeting with the community in Fort Chipewyan. I'm a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Alberta, and I'm director of the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation—and I've provided you with some written material on the latter. I'd like to briefly address two questions this morning that are at the top of my mind as a researcher working in the oil sands.

The first question is whether the oil sands industry can adopt new technologies to improve its environmental performance. Second, what research is required to develop what we call transformative technologies that can be applied to the oil sands? On the first question, for an industry that involves enormous capital investments in the range of tens of billions of dollars, the history has been that this industry has been enormously innovative and willing to embrace change. The plants that you flew over yesterday are nothing like what Suncor looked like in 1967 or what Syncrude looked like in 1978.

The operations have been completely transformed through the mining and extraction operations, and those transformations are based on research and development, pilot testing, and industry innovation here in Canada. The oil sands industry has demonstrated a capacity for technical innovation that I think is unparalleled in the Canadian resource extraction industries. Now, the major driver for this change has been cost. The industry has been striving through the last two decades to reduce its expenses to make itself more profitable.

It may seem strange, but in 1990 Suncor Energy was seriously contemplating shutting down its oil sands division. This is the company that has at times been one of the darlings of the Canadian stock exchange and is currently in the process of taking over Petro-Canada. In 1990 it was looking at getting rid of its oil sands operation altogether because it was so marginal. Instead, they embraced technological change, revamped their mining and extraction operations, and turned the oil sands into a major profit centre.

The other driver for these companies, as we move into the future, is public pressure on the environmental front. I think you have to be realistic as to what the incentives are for companies to embrace innovation and technology change. Cost is always a factor, and environmental regulation and public expectation is, of course, the other. I'm a researcher at the university. My particular focus is on research into long-term innovation. I'm not so much focused on what technology is available today as on what we need to do now to develop technologies that will be available five, ten, and fifteen years out.

The oil sands of Alberta are an enormous strategic resource, and it would be a mistake to focus only on the near term; it's important to position ourselves not only for next year, but decades into the future. I'd like to tell you a little bit about a unique centre at the University of Alberta that I direct, the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation. In 2003, five years ago, the international interest in the oil sands was really just ramping up. The industry was starting to expand, and at that time the president of Imperial Oil, Mr. Tim Hearn, came to the president of the University of Alberta with a unique proposition.

He said, “We need help. We have major resources in northern Alberta but we do not believe that the current technology is sustainable for the long term, so we want to work with you on long-term research and development to try to come up with transformative technologies for the oil sands.” What I'm talking about in transformative technologies is mining that has much less impact on the landscape, extraction technologies that do not use large amounts of fresh water from the Athabasca River and do not create tailings ponds, and upgrading processes that minimize energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Imagine a university president being confronted with a leader from industry saying, we want you to do long-term basic research. Of course the answer was an immediate yes, and we worked to establish a centre that has now grown into one that is national in scope. Why did Hearn come to the University of Alberta? It wasn't just because Edmonton is the closest major centre to the oil sands.

Through support from the Government of Canada through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, in partnership with companies such as Syncrude and Suncor, the University of Alberta had built up a group of professors who were unparallelled in their ability to conduct research and innovation related to oil sands. So it was a long-term investment by the Government of Canada that created the intellectual capacity—the people who were able to undertake this challenge.

In particular, the industrial chairs program and the partnerships programs of NSERC were keys in developing that capability at the university. From an official launch in 2005, I am proud to report that the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation has grown to encompass 20 different projects spanning basic chemistry, biology, physics, and engineering. The successful collaboration with Imperial Oil has led them to renew their commitment. They're providing us with another five years of funding, at $10 million total, because they've been so pleased with the success over the initial five years.

In partnership with the Province of Alberta and the Government of Canada, we're moving forward on another five years of research on oil sands innovation. While I'm immensely proud of the University of Alberta and our intellectual capacity, when it comes to such major research challenges we don't have quite enough intellectual capacity ourselves.

So we've been building a research network on oil sands that now includes the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, Queen's University, and we'll soon be starting projects in collaboration with Natural Resources Canada, the National Research Council, and the University of Ottawa. As director of the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation, I have a fascinating challenge. I'm in the job of teaching professors about the oil sands and some of the challenges they present and trying to enlist and engage their interest and attention.

In the oil sands of western Canada, which span Alberta and Saskatchewan, we have a world-scale resource. We have, in the oil sands industry, an amazing receptor capacity for new technologies and new ideas, and we have a strong foundation in science and engineering to conduct research and development for new technologies that can develop this resource in an environmentally sustainable way. I'd like to thank you for your invitation to speak this morning, and I look forward to questions and discussion on the topic of innovation in the oil sands. Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia): Thank you, Dr. Gray. We will now move on to Dr. Guigard.

(0820) Dr. Selma Guigard (Associate Professor, Environmental Engineering Program, University of Alberta, As an Individual) :

Thank you very much, Mr. Vice-Chair. Thank you to the committee for allowing me to present here today. I have a little brief that I was hoping to develop as a power-point presentation. I'd like to take some time and go through this handout if I may. [ Translation ] With your permission, I'm going to speak a little in French. [ English ] I'm a professor from the University of Alberta in the environmental engineering group of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. I've focused a little bit on the environmental issues related to the oil sands.

These are things I believe you've seen in your previous committee meetings, but I thought I'd go back over them and set the stage in terms of the technologies we're looking at to resolve some of those environmental issues. Some of this information you saw first-hand yesterday in your flyover, and you'll see the oil sands cover a very large surface area. We have a lot of known reserves. Most of those reserves are accessible by the in situ technologies, but about 20% of reserves are also currently accessible by surface mining.

So what you might have seen yesterday was probably surface mining activities, and that's what I would like to focus on a little bit here. What are those environmental issues that are related to oil sand surface mining? The one you're here today to discuss is the environmental issues surrounding the water use of oil sands mining and oil sands surface mining. But directly related to that is the issue of tailings ponds. And also, as Murray Gray pointed out, energy use is another one of those environmental issues. I'd like to talk a little bit about each of those. The first one I'd like to talk about is water use.

We use the Clark hot water extraction process to extract the bitumen from the oil sands. There has always been a little bit of confusion, I think, regarding how much water it actually takes to extract bitumen from the oil sands. You'll notice I've given you a figure of about 12 to 13 barrels of water per barrel of bitumen. The process uses that much water, but 80% to 90% of that water is recycled. Two to about 4.5 barrels of fresh water are needed to make up for some of the water we can't recycle.

So I think that's an important figure for us to look at when we're discussing those water issues surrounding oil sands development. What that translates into is an excessive amount of fresh water is used from the Athabasca River. The water demands on the Athabasca River will continue to grow with further oil sands development. Most of that water that's used ends up in tailings ponds. With the zero discharge policy the oil sands companies have, we don't release that water back into the environment. Directly related to water use is the problem of tailings ponds. [ Translation ] I'm going to continue in French.

I want to talk about tailings ponds. These are structures that we've put in place to hold extraction residues. These residues are placed in the tailings ponds and, after three to five years, the residues form what is called mature fine tailings, which consist of approximately 30% solids, the remainder being mainly water. This water is very difficult to recycle because it is tied up in the tailings. The tailings take a very long time to settle, which means that our tailings ponds will remain there for many years. It must also be admitted that there are nearly 130 km 2 of tailings ponds.

The figure you often hear is 50 km 2 , but the Alberta government has revised its estimates, and we're now talking about 130 km 2 of tailings ponds. So these tailings ponds will increase considerably. We also need new tailings ponds to store the tailings from our development. You unfortunately noticed the deaths of a number of ducks. When you flew over the tailings ponds, you noted that they contain bitumen, which remains from the process that has not been extracted. There is also a lot of salt and toxic compounds such as naphthenic acids and other compounds such as heavy metals.

The consequence of the presence of these compounds is that the water cannot be released to the environment. We have to retain that water, which is currently recycled, but it cannot be recycled indefinitely. This water should be treated using quite major resources in order to be able to continue using it in future. [ English ] I'd like to continue then briefly with the energy use. I know this is not necessarily the focus, but it is an important environmental issue that we must address.

The energy use, for oil sands extraction and mining and upgrading, ranges in the order of 0.7 to 1.3 gigajoules per barrel of bitumen. By calculation, that translates to about 20% of a barrel of bitumen that's needed to produce one barrel of bitumen in terms of energy. The consequence of this is essentially increased greenhouse gas emissions, which we have seen with increased oil sands development. When we look at those environmental issues, we really need to think about what we can do to alleviate these environmental issues.

As Murray Gray pointed out, we need new and innovative technologies, sort of the standout or transformative technology. I look at these technologies in two ways. I look at technologies within the paradigm—within the technology we're currently using—and outside the paradigm, really taking that sort of leap forward and looking at new technologies that would really transform the way things are done in the oil sands industry. What do we need to get to these new technologies, these either inside- or outside-of-the-paradigm technologies? There are challenges there.

For example, there is a large infrastructure, and you all saw it as you flew over the oil sands yesterday. There's a very large infrastructure. Often, the comment that has come back about new and innovative outside-of-the-paradigm technologies is that we can accommodate some incremental changes—minor incremental changes, but changes that are definitely needed, no question about it. There's this infrastructure that we can't just abandon sort of overnight to allow for these new big-leap transformative technologies.

So what we need to do and should do and can do, I believe, is encourage research into new innovative technologies. For that, we need to develop policies that will drive innovation, and we also need to provide some sort of framework that would allow the development of these technologies and demonstration of these technologies beyond the basic research. So we need to have that extra step, extra framework, in place so we can take these technologies from the lab to the field and potentially apply those in the field. We also need to continue to support research and development in improving the current process.

That's a very important part of it. We need to deal with the problems now, but we also need to look into the future and develop very transformative technologies. In

summary, I'd just like to say that there are environmental issues you're all aware of related to the oil sands, but we have to believe innovation is possible, and we have to believe substantial improvements are possible—not just some improvement, but substantial improvement—and we need to develop the oil sands in a more responsible way into the future. Thank you.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Thank you very much to both witnesses. We'll start with the first round of questions. Mr. Trudeau, you have seven minutes.

Mr. Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Lib.) :

Thank you very much for your presentation. It is nice to hear the scientific and the research background here. Yesterday we had a very full day. We had a tour by industry, presenting us some of the positive sides of things, and we had a very heart-wrenching afternoon with native communities who have tremendous concerns about the impact on their lives and their livelihoods. So I'd like to get right into it. Dr. Guigard, you talk about the water in tailings ponds that cannot be released into the environment unless they are treated.

One of the things we saw yesterday morning was much to-do about reclaimed tailing ponds and restoring them. What then happens to the water that was in those tailing ponds, as it is removed from the sands in terms of reclaiming the tailings pond? Where does it go? As you said, it cannot be recycled indefinitely.

(0825) Dr. Selma Guigard :

We are recycling most of the water right now. Right now, there are two types of reclaiming of tailings ponds that we're trying to pursue. There is what we call the “wet landscapes” and the “dry landscapes”. Some of the reclaiming is with the wet landscapes—the water remains, and it caps those tailings ponds, so the tailings ponds become, essentially, a lake. So it is a wet landscape. There's a lot of work going on right now looking at the dry landscape option, looking at technologies that would allow for the tailings to settle and become geotechnically sound to be able to allow for dry landscapes.

Currently the water is not released. As far as I understand, it is capped in end pit lakes if we're trying to reclaim the tailings pond. There is only the one tailings pond that is currently under reclamation, which is Suncor's tailings pond.

Mr. Justin Trudeau :

Even in the potentially dry reclaimed tailings ponds, can you tell me a bit about the nature of the soil? Much was made about it returning to boreal forest. Having been processed and returned to sand, what remains in the soil that would encourage us to believe that it would be able to return to natural forest? Or will it not be possible? What is the science on that?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

As far as I understand it, the solids in the dry landscape would be placed and buried in much the same way as the solids in a landfill. The solids would be capped with soils that could support biotic life.

Mr. Justin Trudeau :

The numbers you gave, that 20% of the energy of a barrel of bitumen needs to go into creating that barrel of bitumen, does the bitumen then need to be transformed, itself, into synthetic crude and to other things, or is bitumen largely used as is?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

That calculation includes upgrading, so it's the energy requirements for upgrading. By no means is it a complete life cycle of bitumen, but it does include the mining, the extraction, and the upgrading of the bitumen.

Mr. Justin Trudeau :

But into bitumen.

Dr. Selma Guigard :

Into crude, which then has to be refined.

Mr. Justin Trudeau :

Do you have the numbers on the “then” processing? I'm trying to get a sense of how much energy in bitumen goes into getting it into a format that we can then use and consume, either in our cars or in heavy industry, in that level of transformation. Do you have any idea how much energy goes into that?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

I don't have those numbers.

Mr. Justin Trudeau :

Does Dr. Gray, perhaps?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

Once the bitumen has been transformed into synthetic crude oil, it takes about 10% further energy use to make transportation fuels, transport it to the end user and so on. The refining side, once you have a synthetic crude, is quite efficient. The only other comment on the energy requirement to transform and recover the bitumen, as Dr. Guigard mentioned, is that there are two main technologies that are in use. There's the in-situ technology. I'm not sure if you saw any of those operations in your flyover yesterday. It's a completely different approach but with much higher energy consumption.

Then there's the mining technology, which, as Dr. Guigard mentioned, is about 20% of the resource, and has much more land and water disturbance but much higher energy efficiency. So there are two sides of the industry. It's a little bit schizophrenic. So when you look at the statistics, you're looking at two very different sets of issues in terms of the pattern of environmental impact and the pattern of energy use.

Mr. Justin Trudeau :

So is the 20% in situ, or is it open mine?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

That would be an average.

Dr. Selma Guigard :

It's an average.

Mr. Justin Trudeau :

Can you give me a sense—I won't hold you to the exact numbers—of what in situ does use up in terms of percentage?

(0830) Dr. Selma Guigard :

My calculations went from roughly 15% to as high as 25%, I believe. Roughly 15% to 30% would probably be the range.

Mr. Justin Trudeau :

How does that compare to other technologies or other sources of energy—coal, natural gas—in terms of energy costs for extraction?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

I think the appropriate comparison is to look at alternate technologies. Don't look at conventional crude oil, because we don't have that available, and don't look at normal natural gas. The two comparisons I like to make are to coal, which is abundant in western Canada and western United States, and the other would be ethanol from farming operations. In the case of coal, the oil sands are much cleaner in terms of carbon emission, and much more efficient from an energy perspective. To make liquid transportation fuels from coal is much worse in terms of the energy balance. The other comparison is to ethanol.

The current ethanol plants in the United States and in Canada get about 1.25 to 1.4 units of energy for every unit of energy put in. Most of the energy put in is from fossil sources. So their yield of energy is actually much worse than from the oil sands. The difference, of course, is when you burn a litre of ethanol, that carbon is from plants and not from fossil fuels.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

We have to go to Monsieur Ouellet. Monsieur Ouellet.

[ Translation ]

Mr. Christian Ouellet (Brome—Missisquoi, BQ) :

May I speak in French or English?

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

You can try French. I'm told the simultaneous

interpretation devices are working now.

Mr. Christian Ouellet :

Thank you. I apologize for being late; I misunderstood the meeting start time and I unfortunately missed part of your presentation. Ms. Guigard, I believe you mentioned the “natural” pollution of the water table by the oil sands. In any case, they contain agents that are present and that have always been pollutants. What exactly is “natural” pollution of the water table?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

We're talking about the water table, not the river. They do a lot of studies at Waterloo University on the compounds present in the water table around the oil sands. This isn't my field. Consequently, I don't have a lot of information on the subject. However, the toxic compound that I know little about concerns the naphthenic acids. I know that the concentrations of naphthenic acids are much higher in the tailings ponds than in the water table.

The studies being conducted at Waterloo University and the University of Alberta are attempting to establish whether there is a way of distinguishing the naphthenic acids naturally present from those present as a result of the extraction of bitumen. They're currently trying to determine whether those compounds come from bitumen that is naturally present or are there as a result of bitumen extraction and, consequently, whether it comes from the tailings ponds. I don't know the current levels.

Also, all the data from the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program, which of course studies the Athabasca River, not only the water tables, have shown that there weren't a lot of naphthenic acids in the Athabasca River. I suppose the same is true of the water tables, but I don't have the data with me.

Mr. Christian Ouellet :

So the water was relatively hazardous to health. The wells were naturally relatively dangerous.

Dr. Selma Guigard :

The concentrations weren't high. From what I know, the naphthenic acid concentrations are very low in the water tables. They are very high in the tailings ponds, but the concentrations are quite low, indeed non-toxic, in the water tables.

(0835) Mr. Christian Ouellet :

Are they low enough for people to be able to draw the water without any danger to their health?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

Once again, I don't have the figures with me. I haven't monitored the concentrations. So I'm not sure. Perhaps we should look at the data that Waterloo University has published in this field.

Mr. Christian Ouellet :

Are heavy metals released into the river?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

Not as far as I know.

Mr. Christian Ouellet :

Are there any heavy metals in the tailings ponds?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

There are heavy metals in the ores. These are heavy metals that were present, but the concentration levels of which have greatly increased as a result of the process.

Mr. Christian Ouellet :

One day or another, can it filter through the soil or wind up in the river in some other way?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

Heavy metals are not very mobile in the environment. You often find them in solid tailings, but not in the liquid part. They are often associated with solids, not with liquids, except if they are chemically combined with other compounds. However, they often stay with solid tailings.

Mr. Christian Ouellet :

Could heavy metals be transported long distances by the river? If they pass through the soil, could they wind up a few kilometers downstream?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

Heavy metals are often associated with solids. Consequently, if heavy metals wind up in the rivers, they'll be found in river sediments.

Mr. Christian Ouellet :

When the river was not being used and was in a natural state, did heavy metals that degraded from the river banks flow into the river?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

I don't know. You should perhaps consult the data of the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program.

[ English ]

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

May I add to Dr. Guigard's comments? The heavy metals are extremely difficult to remove from the bitumen. They have no mobility in the ecosystem. My own personal research has been in finding ways to try to remove those metals from the oil sands system. So far we have not succeeded. It's so difficult that even in a laboratory we have not found effective ways to remove those metals and get them to mobilize. If anyone could come up with a method, we would be thrilled to use it in processing this heavy material so that the metals are not an issue.

The tailings material and the nature of the oil sands are unique compared to mining anywhere else in the world. If you hear about tailings problems in mines elsewhere in Canada, the tailings are fundamentally different for the oil sands. The contamination is organic material. It's partly biodegradable, as Dr. Guigard said, based on studies at Waterloo and Alberta. It's not things like arsenic, cyanide, nickel, or other heavy metals, which are so much of a problem with tailings elsewhere in Canada. So it's a completely unique system.

If you canoe through these rivers, which I have, you find that oil is part of the natural ecosystem in the Fort McMurray area. You go to a campsite on the Clearwater River, and you see little droplets of oil coming up out of the riverbank with naphthenic acids at low concentration. As Dr. Guigard said, the key question for the ecosystem is not whether these compounds are present, it's the concentration. It's a unique system. The Athabasca River has an amazing capacity to degrade oil. You can watch little oil slicks form and then disappear as the organisms in the water degrade the material.

The load is the key question. How much release, how much concentration, and how much of that material will go downstream to communities like Fort Chipewyan? That's the question for which, as Dr. Guigard said, we don't yet have the answers.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Ms. Duncan.

Ms. Linda Duncan (Edmonton—Strathcona, NDP) :

Thank you. I was very interested, Dr. Gray, at the very beginning when you talked about what the barriers are to advancing, making the tar sands profitable and environmentally benign. I'm encouraged that you've identified not only that it's a cost but it's a regulation. Do you think the regulations there are strong enough to drive the adoption of better innovations and cleaner production?

(0840) Dr. Murray R. Gray :

I think you need to look at which impact you're concerned about. You need to partition them, I think, a little bit. The impacts that I see are on land and land reclamation, water use and tailings, energy use and greenhouse gases. The first two I think are much more amenable to regulation and getting the industry to speed up reclamation and to minimize the accumulation of tailings. The greenhouse gas issues I think are much less amenable to relatively painless regulatory implementation because the technologies that are available for dealing with carbon dioxide are significantly more expensive.

Ms. Linda Duncan :

If I could, I'll just interject, because I'm not understanding your answer. My question is, do you think that the regulations are stringent enough now on the impacts on the land and water that they're actually driving the investment in the improved technology?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

Yes, I think they are. But the other side of it that you need to keep in mind is, at least in the industry as it stands now, when a new mine is opened, it's opened after a regulatory process that approves the plan of how that resource will be developed, how the tailings will be managed, and how the mine will be closed. The opportunity in terms of regulation and public discourse is essentially at the stage when a mine project comes up for approval.

When it's approved, that's essentially a contract between the regulatory agencies and the companies that then governs how that particular lease will be developed over the course of its life. If I look at the history in Alberta, you can't rewrite the book with a company. My personal feeling is that you can't try to change the rules once the company has done half of its plan. The plan that Syncrude filed, for example, was before it opened its mine in 1978.

They laid out, based on the technology of the day, what they were going to do with the oil sand and how they were going to reclaim the mine site, and they're proceeding with that reclamation process.

Ms. Linda Duncan :

But the current regulations—and I'm actually looking at the federal regulations as well, because our panel is federal.... I know how the regulatory system works and I know it could also be opened up, if we find that we need to improve the standards. I'd actually like to ask this question of Dr. Guigard, because in your presentation you had suggested there were a number of serious problems with the tar sands and issues that we needed to address. You'd mentioned that in the lab you seem to be moving forward with some solutions. But these are not moving into the field. This is what I'm trying to get at.

I'm trying to understand why. First of all, could you tell me if you think there are some advances where we could in fact be using substantially less water, or where we could having a mechanism for developing the tar sands with less impact on the land and so forth? Are the things you're developing in the lab actually moving out to the field in the new developments? If they're not, why are they not?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

There are some developments that are happening in the lab, looking at waterless extraction technologies, for example. You might have seen some of the work that I've been doing in looking at a waterless extraction process. We've been working on that in the lab. And I've seen some others publicized a little bit in the newspapers, and less so in the peer-reviewed journals, because I think there are a lot of issues regarding patents and what not. But there are technologies out there. Which technology is the best? We still don't have the answers.

If I can speak a little bit from personal experience, one of the challenges we've been facing with this research—and which I've also seen from other people who have been doing similar work—is that going from the lab to a pilot scale project to prove its economic potential and environmental gains is a very expensive process. We're talking several millions of dollars, and it's very high risk. So balancing the cost of that with the high risk is a difficult sell for a researcher and potentially for some of the people proposing some new innovative technologies.

Then, as I mentioned in my presentation, there's the issue that if we have such large infrastructure in place, how can we move ahead with these new technologies and leave that infrastructure in behind? I think those have been two of the challenges that I have faced, basically the risk and the associated costs of moving it into a provable—

(0845) Ms. Linda Duncan :

Dr. Guigard, are you seeing any movement in this? I appreciate your testimony, which is actually very informative, but we have a lot of applications in the hopper. We have a lot of proposals, and once they get the funding the investments are going to be moving forward again. So it sounds like we're putting lots of federal money into the R and D, but it's not going anywhere, because nobody wants to spend the money, or it's too risky, and so forth. How much of the R and D being done across Canada is actually being deployed and incorporated into permitting and development?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

I would say that's a difficult question to answer, because when we do research and development, it's just that, research and development, and all of those things that are tested in the lab and work in the lab might not work when we go up to pilot scale. For example, there are technologies that really work well in the lab, but to scale them up poses a whole host of new challenges. So I don't think we're investing dollars that aren't going to bear fruit. Eventually, there might be some other innovation that comes out of that, but there are some technologies....

I guess we feel, my collaborators and I on this project, that there seems to be a chasm that makes going from that basic small pilot scale to the large pilot scale a very difficult leap. We found there has been a little bit of movement with private and venture capitalists, if you will, or angel investors. Those seem to be the people who are willing to take a little bit more of a risk.

Ms. Linda Duncan :

Who decides what moneys will be spent on an innovation centre? Is it simply the scientists? Is it the people who provide the funding? Are there first nations involved? I'm curious to know who sets the priorities for the innovation centre.

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

For our innovation centre, the priorities are set by the people who are providing the funding, along with the University of Alberta. So we have an executive committee that consists of representatives from industry, the Government of Alberta, and from the University of Alberta, the major partners in the centre, and they decide on the scientific direction.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Thank you. I'm going to have to go to Mr. Warawa.

Mr. Mark Warawa (Langley, CPC) :

Thank you, Chair. Thank you to the witnesses for being here. You were both highly recommended, so it's good to hear your testimony this morning. The focus has been on the open pit mining as opposed to the in situ. Is that where your expertise is? Should I be asking questions about the open pit and not in situ?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

I know a little bit about in situ, but not as much as some of my work, which is on surface mining.

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

You can try us.

Mr. Mark Warawa :

The main focus of this committee was to focus on water. As we've already seen this morning, the questions have been quite broad, talking about energy impacts with Mr. Trudeau, and so on. Yesterday we heard about treaty issues. We're finding that our discussion is evolving quite quickly. When I was here two years ago, I took a trip on the Athabasca, by river. I was not able to fly over, as we did yesterday, so I've had both perspectives, and also did the tourist information centre. I'm finding this quite edifying, so I appreciate your input.

Two years ago I saw that the hydrocarbons were naturally leaching right into the Athabasca, as you've said. Dr. Gray, you said that organisms in the Fort McMurray oil sands area deal uniquely with the oil. As human beings, do we deal with these hydrocarbons in a unique way? Or are they unique organisms? In other words, are human beings being affected in a constant that would be harmful to be drinking water in the area from the Athabasca that has a hydrocarbon content that is higher than the norm?

Do we react and get sick or have diseases or cancers because we're drinking water that has maybe been contaminated naturally?

(0850) Dr. Murray R. Gray :

I'm a professor of chemical engineering, so I have to beg ignorance on the detailed medical aspects. I know I've tasted the water. As I mentioned to Monsieur Ouellet, the key is in concentration. The big issue for anyone who's interested in the effect on drinking water is what is the concentration of these compounds in the water? That's key to how it affects any organism, whether it's a micro-organism that loves to eat the oil, or whether it's fish or larger animals like humans, moose, and what not.

Mr. Mark Warawa :

Some of these toxins are biocumulative, and in humans it may continue to build and build and build to a point where the amount that you've accumulated in your body now has a manifestation in the form of your becoming sick. It's a natural occurrence, because of drinking water with hydrocarbons in it.

Dr. Selma Guigard :

This is actually a question for a toxicologist, I'd say, an environmental toxicologist.

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

In terms of hydrocarbons, which I can answer your question on, hydrocarbons, in general, do not typically bioaccumulate in humans. That doesn't mean there's no health impact. Some of the light hydrocarbons that are present in gasoline, for example, can cause cancer in humans, but they don't tend to accumulate.

Mr. Mark Warawa :

Okay. I'm going to switch gears--and thank you for that. I want to talk about the tailings ponds that we saw. They talked about adding gypsum. Right now we have the water and the sand that's part of this water, that's pouring into this big reservoir, the tailing ponds. The sand, because it's heavy, drops down to the bottom, but you have this clay that stays suspended for years. We've heard and in reading that it could be 30 years, 40 years. So to speed that process up, they add gypsum into the water, and suddenly the clay's now dropped to the bottom and your water is cleaner.

Therefore, it's possible to reclaim those tailing ponds in a very short period of time by adding the gypsum. Is this one of the new transformative technologies we found through research and development, that by adding gypsum, suddenly you could reclaim very quickly?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

The addition of gypsum, or calcium sulphate, has been quite well known for a long time. What's been more transformative is the techniques the companies have developed to mix it. They take the tailings, mix in gypsum and sand, and then they can put that mixture back into the mine. Basically, they can empty the sludge from the tailings pond and put it back into the mine. The difficulty in this whole process is that once you add gypsum, the resulting water is awful for recycling into the plant to recover the bitumen.

In the past, companies picked their water composition to get the most oil possible out of the oil sands. The downside was that it created the worst possible tailings problem. If you treat the water to get the best possible tailings behaviour, you get the worst possible bitumen recovery when you recycle that water. That's the challenge they're trying to juggle right now. To me, this provides an opportunity to come up with new approaches. If you can change the water chemistry between the tailings pond and the plant, you may be able to get the bitumen and get rid of the tailings problem at the same time.

That's one of the potential paths forward, using water. The other path forward is to use technologies that don't use water at all—you don't remove water from the Athabasca River and you don't create wet tailings in the first place. There's certainly a lot of merit in those approaches.

Dr. Selma Guigard :

That's what they call the “CT”, or composite tailings, process. They've been investigating it for several years now. There are problems with the quality of the recycled water. There are very high levels of calcium—because they're adding gypsum—that have caused problems in the extraction process. The processes of tailings and extraction, the water extraction process, are intimately integrated. The issue has been whether to emphasize the extraction, the bread and butter, or the tailings problem.

There has been a real challenge in dealing with tailings, because you also want to make sure that you have good quality recycled water to lower the water demands on the Athabasca River. It's a difficult problem, and a challenge for the water extraction process.

(0855) Mr. Mark Warawa :

We saw the tailing ponds, and we saw a ditch around them. Around the base there was a system to ensure that there was no leaching of the tailing ponds into the Athabasca. The groundwater below it was being sucked up and pumped back into the tailing ponds. So it seemed to be designed quite well to ensure protection against leaching into the Athabasca. Are you aware of any leaching from tailing ponds into the Athabasca?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

What you saw were the seepage dikes and the channels around the tailings ponds to capture any of the seepage. These tailings ponds are not lined, so systems are in place to capture any seepage and return it to the tailings ponds. A study out of the University of Waterloo is looking at groundwater, with a view to ensuring that there's no seepage. What they're trying to use are these naphthenic acids, looking at their fingerprint in the tailings ponds and trying to learn whether there is seepage into adjacent water bodies, like the Athabasca River, or groundwater.

Mr. Mark Warawa :

Is the study ongoing? Is there any indication of a leaching problem?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

Right now the science and engineering, as far as I understand it, is looking at the analytical technologies to measure naphthenic acids. As the name implies, naphthenic acids are a group of acids. There's a lot of research going into developing analytical techniques that are sensitive enough to detect low concentrations of naphthenic acids, along with analytical techniques that can actually see the fingerprints of those naphthenic acids. This would allow us to say for sure whether there is seepage or not.

Mr. Mark Warawa :

But at this point, we don't know.

Dr. Selma Guigard :

As far as I understand it, we don't have a clear understanding, from an analytical point of view, whether there is or not.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Thank you, Mr. Warawa. We have to freelance a bit, since we're travelling. And we have only a few minutes left in this particular segment. I would suggest, if the committee members are in agreement, that we allow four-minute questions to anyone who hasn't had a question. And I would like to ask one too. That will take us pretty much to 9:15. Is that okay?

Some hon. members: Agreed.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia): Okay. I have a quick question. Are consolidated tailings stackable tailings? Are they the same thing?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

No.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

That term has come up, “stackable tailings”.

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

Stackable tailings, I think, are the dream for the mining side of the industry. It would mean you could immediately put tailings back into the mine and start reclaiming right away. One of the unique characteristics of these mines is that because of the tailings, they have a very long delay between opening the mine and being able to begin reclamation. The consolidated tailings release a lot of water, and this requires a basin. With stackable tailings, you could immediately put solid material back into the mine site.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Without going through a tailings pond?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

Without going through a pond at all.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

I imagine you're familiar with Dr. Randy Mikula. Is that what he's working on, stackable tailings?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

Yes. He's a world expert in dealing with tailings in any conceivable way.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

You were saying that the water that is left over after the consolidation process is quite degraded and can't really be used for extraction. Are you saying it can't be used efficiently, that it still is being used for extraction, but they're not getting the best results, or are they just not using it, and if not, where is that water going?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

The water is still going into the tailings ponds, but they are investigating technologies to treat that water to get a sufficiently good quality for extraction. So they have been using that, but they've noticed that the quality.... With the CT process--and I'm not sure how many years it's been in place--most of the tailings ponds still contain these mature, fine tails that haven't necessarily been touched by CT, and the water is still being used for recycling. They realize that they might need to do some water treatment with the water that's coming off the CT prior to extraction.

(0900) The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

So right now when they're reclaiming a pond--I think Suncor is reclaiming a pond--what are they doing with the water that is so degraded they can't use it for extraction and they can't put it in the river? I'm wondering if we're just moving the water around.

Dr. Selma Guigard :

I think.... I'm not sure.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

I know you're doing some interesting research, Dr. Guigard. Maybe you could tell us a bit about that. The sense I'm getting from you is that these outside-the-box technologies are receiving little funding, maybe partially because from an oil company's perspective, if they funded your technologies and they worked, it would require even more funding for major pilot projects. And if the pilot projects worked, they'd have to rethink their whole infrastructure. Is that a block? I put that question up against the idea that the industry is giving you $10 million, Dr.

Gray, which is nothing to sneeze at, but when you consider the global investments, when we talk about the upcoming investments over the next whatever it is--10, 20 years--we're talking about $120 billion. The industry is giving you only $10 million. Again, it's nothing to sneeze at, but given the problems that we have, it seems like a drop in the bucket. I'm sure you appreciate it and your researchers appreciate it, and it's keeping research in Canada, but I'd like your take on that. Then we'll go on to Mr. Braid.

Dr. Selma Guigard :

The technology that I'm using is called supercritical fluid extraction, which has been used on a lab scale to extract bitumen from oil sands successfully. Right now we're looking at carbon dioxide. It uses carbon dioxide at about 40 degrees and at relatively high pressure. It acts as a solvent that can extract the bitumen from the oil sands, and it can do that with little or no water. Carbon dioxide is one example of a supercritical solvent, but there are many other compounds that could be used as supercritical solvents.

You bring them up to pressure and temperature, you use them, you bring the pressure down, you recover your bitumen, and you recycle your solvent. So it's essentially almost a closed process in terms of the solvent. It needs little to no water. Right now we're looking at water to develop a continuous process that would be able to handle large masses of ore, but that's what we need to prove on a pilot scale. Can we do this at a large enough scale? One of the big challenges is looking at changing their infrastructure completely, changing the way things are done completely.

It's also a technology that needs development, and it's going to take some time to develop. The water extraction process is working. We're fine-tuning it, but it's working. How do we impose such a large change?

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

That's the question.

Dr. Selma Guigard :

That's the big challenge.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Thank you. Go ahead, Dr. Gray.

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

I'll just follow up on a couple of comments by Dr. Guigard. When you look at technology development, to come up with a transformative technology you expect to have to look at 10 to 20 different ideas that you pursue through university-type research. Then you decide which are the most promising ones to spend tens of millions of dollars on to fully develop and commercialize. So I think the important thing to ask the industry is what kind of list of opportunities they're looking at. Don't anticipate that each one of those ideas is necessarily a feasible answer that would be commercializable.

On the research side, we expect to have a lot of ideas in the hopper. Some of them work and some of them don't work in terms of coming up with new technology. You have to have as many failures as successes.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Thank you. We'll go to Mr. Braid.

Mr. Peter Braid (Kitchener—Waterloo, CPC) :

Thank you very much, Mr. Vice-Chair. I have four minutes. Is that correct? I want to make sure that I don't run out of time. Could you give me a 30-second warning?

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Absolutely. You'll be okay. I'm sure you'll be fine.

Mr. Peter Braid :

Thank you very much. Thank you, Drs. Gray and Guigard, for being here this morning and for your testimony. I was very interested to learn more about the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation and the work you're doing as well, Dr. Guigard. Dr. Gray, I wonder if I could start with you. Could you just briefly touch on the main areas or themes of innovation your institute is pursuing? I presume that one is carbon capture and storage. I've heard a little bit about waterless extraction as well. What are the key areas, as you see them?

(0905) Dr. Murray R. Gray :

There are three key themes we're working on. One is improved mining technology that allows mining without as much impact on the landscape. Another is waterless or near-waterless extraction to particularly minimize the tailings. The use of water is less of an issue, in my mind, than the accumulation of tailings and the contamination of water that comes out of the tailings. But a major theme for us is moving away from that technology completely. The third theme is new technology for upgrading the bitumen. Ironically, we are not currently doing any work on carbon capture, and the reason for that is simple.

We have not yet found a unique opportunity in the oil sands that links to carbon capture. Carbon capture is a huge issue for the industry, but it has it in common with the electric power industry, which burns coal in western Canada, and with other aspects of refining and processing hydrocarbon fuels. What we're trying to do at our centre is look for unique opportunities for research that can be transformative for the oil sands industry. We're still looking for that opportunity in the area of carbon capture that would be uniquely applicable to the oil sands.

Mr. Peter Braid :

And are you collaborating with any universities, either in Canada or the U.S.?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

We are collaborating. As I mentioned earlier, our centre has projects with the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and Queen's University. We hope within a few weeks to start a project at the University of Ottawa. I was down at Rice University in Houston last week talking about potential collaboration, and we've been talking with groups at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, about potential collaboration. So we're reaching out where we see particular expertise that we need to try to enlist in this enterprise.

Mr. Peter Braid :

Great. I'm the member of Parliament for Kitchener--Waterloo. The University of Waterloo is in my riding, and I'm a little bit familiar with the great work they're doing there in the faculty of environment and the water institute. Do you think that the work Dr. George Dixon and Professor David Rudolph and others are doing would be of value for this committee to learn more about?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

Yes.

Mr. Peter Braid :

It was a rhetorical question. Thank you. Let's touch on the reclamation process. Could you provide your assessment of the success of the reclamation process and any areas of improvement with respect to that sort of thing?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

There's a lot of research going on in tailings reclamation basically looking at trying to get the tailings ponds to settle faster so we can reclaim. But the other issue in getting the tailings ponds to settle faster is that if they settle faster, they'll release more water, which we can then recycle. So there is a lot of work going on in that area. There are two beliefs in terms of what a reclaimed tailings pond looks like. Does it look like a dry landscape where we can put in trees and restore the forest? Or is it a wet landscape where there could be a lake that could eventually be used?

So there are those two different approaches, and there's a lot of debate about which approach is the better approach to be used. I'm currently involved in the tailings project at the University of Alberta through the Alberta Water Research Institute. It is looking at accelerated tailings densification, if you will, to try to get more recycled water and to eventually reclaim the tailings. So there's a lot of research going on in that area.

Mr. Peter Braid :

Very good.

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

I was just going to add that I'm not an expert in this area at all, but for me as a Canadian, one of the key policy issues is what constitutes successful reclamation. This has been an area of huge debate. Does reclamation constitute putting the landscape back into a productive mode for recreation and other human activity, or does it constitute putting the landscape back to exactly the same way it was before? I've seen criticism of reclaimed areas in the Fort McMurray area, because they're not going back to muskeg. Is that an issue or not? That's a policy issue.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

One more quick question, Mr. Braid.

Mr. Peter Braid :

I'm just looking for a one-sentence answer on this next one. What's your vision of what the oil sands development should look like ten years from now?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

I would say no more tailings ponds. That would be my vision. If we could eliminate tailings ponds, that would transform the mining side of the industry completely. You would see much faster movement from mining to reclamation, and a much reduced area of land disturbance at any given time.

(0910) The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Great. Mr. Calkins.

Mr. Blaine Calkins (Wetaskiwin, CPC) :

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I certainly appreciate the testimony. I'm going to be quite quick and direct and focused in my questions. Are you familiar with work that's now being done by Mr. Gradek, of Gradek Energy, insofar as a bipolymer bead designed to attract hydrocarbons and repel water is concerned? Do you know about that technology or where that's at?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

I don't know where it's at. I've heard of it, and I know you will be talking to him tomorrow.

Mr. Blaine Calkins :

I was just hoping to get some insight before we had that opportunity. Obviously there's the work that you do in high-level research at the university level, and we talked about the next step, which is the applied research, taking the useful things you guys can do in the laboratory and extending that out into the field. How far away is the next great leap in technology?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

If I look at the history of the industry, about the shortest cycle I've seen for implementing a transformative new technology has been in the range of five years, from initial conception through to the start of construction. So it's seven years or more from the initial idea through to being able to start a full-scale operation. That's the time scale.

Mr. Blaine Calkins :

And that's going to require a lot of investment, obviously, and it's obviously going to involve the right decisions being made by policy-makers as far as approvals and permits to move forward with those new technologies are concerned, because with every new technology come new challenges—and new things, expected or unexpected, often come with that. A question I have is about water usage. Is the water that comes out of the Athabasca River treated, or is it raw water that simply goes into the process and is heated up for the extraction process? Do you know?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

I don't think it's treated. It's used for a number of different applications. The water that comes out of the Athabasca River is used for the extraction, but it's also used for the industrial or mining purposes as well.

Mr. Blaine Calkins :

My understanding of the process is that no chemicals are really added into the process. Everything that we have in the tailings ponds, all the heavy metals, everything that we see in the tailings ponds, was actually naturally occurring. It either got pumped in through the process.... It was naturally occurring in the Athabasca River, or it was naturally occurring in the soils. Is that true, or is there a chemical solvent, a diluent or something like that, that's added into the process we should know about?

Dr. Murray R. Gray :

All of the technologies use solvent in treating the bitumen at one point of the process. So all of the tailings ponds contain solvents. In comparison with the naphthenic acid material, the solvents are readily biodegradable. So they pose a short-term environmental issue, but they don't have the kind of persistence in the environment that the naphthenic acid material has. As for other chemicals that are added, some of the companies use sodium hydroxide or lye to adjust the pH to make the water less acidic, but that's a relatively benign additive. One company uses a citric acid, which is found in orange juice.

So it's readily biodegradable. So there are some additives used, but for the most part, they're less of a concern in terms of environmental impact than the acids that come out of the bitumen.

Dr. Selma Guigard :

Some of these compounds, as Dr. Gray mentioned, are biodegradable, but this makes for some interesting challenges in the tailings ponds when they do biodegrade. We all think that these ponds are dead and there's nothing there, but micro-organisms exist everywhere, and they exist in those tailings ponds. And it's been noticed that with the addition of certain of these compounds, when the micro-organisms that actually exist in these tailings ponds are degrading, they produce gases.

Some of these gases—such as methane, when it starts to be generated in the tailings ponds—actually help densification, so the tailings settle faster. However, you do have tailings ponds producing methane and some other gases.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Thank you. We're going to have to move on to Mr. Watson now, for four minutes.

Mr. Jeff Watson (Essex, CPC) :

Thank you, Mr. Vice-Chair. Thank you to our witnesses for appearing. Maybe I missed this because I was writing a lot of notes down, but I want to come back to the number of barrels of water per barrel of bitumen in production. What is that total number again, and what is the split of freshwater versus recycled water?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

The total amount of water is of the order of 12 to 13 barrels, as some of the publications suggest. Of that, about 80% to 90% is recycled. Syncrude, in their last sustainability report, published a figure of 88% recycled. So if you take the 12 to 13 barrels and recycle 80% to 90% of that water, you will need some water to make up for what is still needed. That comes from the Athabasca River. It's about two to four and a half barrels.

(0915) Mr. Jeff Watson :

Four and a half?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

Yes. It depends. There is a large range out there right now. If you look at some of the recent sustainability reports, it's 2, 2.7, and 3, but it's been as high as 4.5 barrels.

Mr. Jeff Watson :

Okay. I asked because I'm trying to reconcile the idea of 90% recycled water per barrel with the idea it could take up to four barrels of fresh draw on that. I'm doing the math at 1,000 barrels, and then the second thousand and the third thousand barrels, and I'm not quite getting the same calculation. I'm not a great mathematician, but I just wanted to know. Where do those numbers come from, by the way? Sometimes statistics just get quoted and after a while become truth themselves and people forget where they came from.

Dr. Selma Guigard :

They're from the National Energy Board. Also, if you go back to the sustainability reports for each of the oil sands developers, such as Shell, Syncrude, and Suncor, you can actually calculate that number.

Mr. Jeff Watson :

Returning to reclamation for just a moment here, are we on the verge of significantly increasing the pace of reclamation? We're beginning to assess the first major reclamation project and the first tailings pond is about to be reclaimed. How many decades was that pond in use before it was reclaimed? What can you anticipate the future pace being? Is the next three- to five-year window going to see significant progress in that direction? How many years will it take from the opening of a new tailings pond to reclamation? Are we about to improve on that pace or not? Will it be significant, in your estimation, or is it still going to be a long-term process?

Dr. Selma Guigard :

There was recently a directive put out by the Alberta government to try to give a bit of a regulatory push to speed up reclamation of tailings ponds. My personal opinion is there's still a lot of work to be done on the research side, in terms of reclaiming those tailings ponds. And again, it depends how we see those tailings ponds being reclaimed. Is it an end-pit lake? Is it a return to muskeg forest? What does that reclamation look like? So there has been a little bit of a regulatory push from the Alberta government, but how that is going to translate, I'm not sure.

Mr. Jeff Watson :

Okay.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Good. Thank you very much, Mr. Watson. Thank you so much for your presentations. They were a great way to kick off our hearings here. I think we clarified a lot of things in our minds about the technological aspects. I wish you continued success and good work. Thanks again.

(0920) The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

We are a bit pressed for time, so I would ask that we resume now. We have with us for our second segment Mary Griffiths; Dr. David Schindler, from the University of Alberta; and William Donahue, an independent researcher in limnology and biochemistry. Each witness will have ten minutes to present, and then we'll move on to questioning, as we normally do. Dr. Donahue, I'm told that you'll be starting. So without further ado, please go ahead.

Mr. William F. Donahue (Independent Researcher, Limology and Biogeochemistry, As an Individual) :

What I'm going to do is talk about the changing water supply in the Athabasca River, focusing on the entire basin, and general implications in terms of what that might mean for water-intensive development. I think I'll start with a basic

summary of what science is. I don't know if anyone has talked to you about what science is, but according to some, science consists of formulation and testing of hypotheses based on observational evidence. In this, experiments are important or applicable, but their function is to verify observation and impose controlled conditions. According to Richard Feynman, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist and popular writer, science alone, of all subjects, contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallability of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation.

As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. I'd qualify that by saying it's the belief of experts in the ignorance of experts. Generally, I would say that I would describe science as the systematic observation of natural events and conditions in order to discover facts about them and from which explanations for them are formulated, subsequently asking and attempting to answer directed critical questions that are inspired by evident disagreement between observed fact and the explanations we have previously formulated.

In other words, science is a process by which we learn, and it involves constant attempts to disprove what we think we know, by asking critical questions and rationally seeking their answers. The next slide is “What is not science?” What is not science is anything that doesn't involve the collection of data and the attempt to formulate general explanations for them or the subsequent testing of such prior explanations via further observation and hypothesis-forming. Alternatively, what is not science is anything that has been shown scientifically to be incorrect and yet it's still presented as conclusive.

The second aspect, I would say, is what we see a lot of in what we're talking about today in terms of environmental science. Now on to some other topics. This is table 1 in the submission I gave you. Basically what it shows is changes in temperature and precipitation for northern Alberta. Much of this was presented in

part in a paper Dr. Schindler and I published in 2006. The general message is that in the majority of centres in northern Alberta, as well as much of the western prairie provinces, there have been fairly substantial increases in temperature since about 1970. I looked at 1970 for a number of reasons, which I explain in the submission. Generally, the pattern is significant increases in temperature, significant declines in total precipitation, and generally either no change in rain or decreases, depending on where you are.

If you're interested in water supply, certainly increased temperatures and declining precipitation are critical in that. The next slide is changes in winter snowpack in northern Alberta. Again, these patterns are evident across the prairies. We live in the rain shadow of the Rockies here in Alberta, and ultimately a lot of our water supply comes from snowpack in the spring, and we rely upon a lot of that. As you can see here, what's in red shows changes in the number of days per year in which there's snow on the ground and changes in the absolute depth of snowpack at its maximum.

The general trend, again, is that the majority of places have shown, since 1970, a significant decline in the length of time during the winter in which snow is on the ground and the total depth of the snowpack. Again, if you're relying on winter snowpack for a lot of spring melt water and all of the pulse-oriented, ecological processes that occur in a river with declining snowpack, you can expect fairly substantial ecological effects in surface waters. What I show here is total summer flow in the Athabasca River at Fort McMurray. This is figure 1 in the submission.

(0925) In general, as you can see, there is a fair amount of variation from year to year, but ultimately the trend since about 1970 is a fairly significant decline. 1998 was a pretty wet year across the prairies. Ultimately, from year to year, you don't really know whether there's going to be quite a bit of water or very little water, but as I said, the trend is generally downwards. And this consideration of long-term trends is probably the first thing you should attempt to use in order to inform some kind of plan that is dependent on water supply. Ms.

Griffiths is going to be talking about the Cold Lake area and groundwater, and I just thought I'd toss this one on. This isn't in my submission, but this is the Beaver River near Cold Lake. It's the major river in that part of the world and it's a basin that's independent to itself in east central Alberta. As you can see again, there's substantial variation from year to year in terms of total flow in the Beaver River, but ultimately in the last 40 to 50 years the decline has been pretty substantial. And you can see this a lot in the lakes and other surface waters in that area.

A lot of lakes in that area are down substantially. Another thing I presented in my submission was what's happening in the Athabasca basin on a sub-basin level? What I did, and I explained this in the submission, is took a bunch of monitoring points on the Athabasca River and looked at the changes in water flow between those points: What is added? How is the flow different at a downstream point from an upstream point? This is with the assumption that this change in water is the water that's added from the basin between those points.

As you can see, if you head up into the Sunwapta River, which is the tributary of the Athabasca that drains some of the glaciers in the Rockies, since the early seventies up until the mid-nineties there was actually an increase in the amount of water coming off the catchment. This is because of increases in glacial melt. As you move downstream to Jasper, the flow hasn't really changed much. The farther downstream into the basin and away from the mountains you get, the greater the decline in the amount of water coming off the basin.

For those of you who aren't really aware of the geography of the Athabasca basin, Hinton is about 80 kilometres east of Jasper, just outside the mountains in the foothills of the Athabasca basin. The basin that's downstream of Hinton comprises 94% of the total area of the basin. What this analysis shows is that in all points between Hinton and Fort McMurray, the amount of water coming off the basin into the river has declined by about 50% since the early 1970s up until 2001 to 2005.

What I've given you now is a picture of where things have been and how things have been changing in terms of climate change and water supply. Looking to the future, out of the University of Victoria there are some climate change projects there. They have created one of the main models for the global circulation models that predict future changes in temperature for much of Canada. What I did here was summarize the output of ten regional models for the western prairie provinces. This shows you the degree of temperature change that is anticipated as a result of one of these models.

As you can see, it's anticipated that in the 21st century, the temperature for the western prairie provinces is going to increase, on average, 6.5 degrees. In the next diagram I've shown you what this means in terms of changes in climate. That's approximately the same as the difference in climate between Calgary and Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories. So what we could expect, if we realize that degree of temperature change, is that the climate in Calgary moves north to Fort Smith. What does that mean in terms of water supply? I did some modelling.

I haven't included many of the details, but I created some models that predicted river flow and water yield, based solely on climate variables, things like temperature, snowpack, evaporation. In that way I remove a lot of the other information that other modellers need that is much more detailed, simply because there's an abject lack of data when it comes to this sort of thing, in terms of hydro-geological information, sediment types, ground cover, detailed evaporation measurements.

Much of the water modelling that's out there is being produced as a result of intensive research on a very small scale, catchments that are of the order of less than a hectare in size. So trying to scale those results up to an area that's tens of thousands of kilometres square is impossible at this time.

(0930) Based on my models, I looked at a series of catchments in northeastern Alberta that ranged from about 300 square kilometres to 30,000 square kilometres. In trying to replicate what's happened in the past in terms of water flow, the model predicts about 75% of the variation in historical data, so it's fairly accurate in terms of replicating what's happened in the past. I then tweaked the model to basically put forward scenarios of increases of three degrees and six degrees centigrade and looked at how that would conceivably affect water supply.

In the blue, you see changes that are predicted as a result of a three-degree centigrade increase, and in the red, changes as a result of a six-degree centigrade increase. On average, with a three-degree centigrade increase--and this encompasses all the years and all the catchments--the model suggests an anticipated 15% decline in the amount of water coming off these basins of this area of northeastern Alberta between April and October. For a six-degree increase, the average was 39%. The numbers below each of the bars represent the worst case, the worst year, of the data that I used for each of the basins.

There are going to be wet years and there are going to be dry years, just as there have been in the past. However, it's the really dry years that likely will concern most people. The numbers below each bar represent the worst-case scenario in terms of dry years for the three- and six-degree centigrade changes. As you can see, it ranged from percentages in the high 30s to about 70%, depending on the basin, for the three-degree increase. For the six-degree increase, in dry years it was very, very bad, ranging from 50% to 100% on the basin. For the most part, it's in the range of a 60-70% decline.

If you're not looking at changing trends in water in the past when you formulate your management plans in terms of what you're going to rely on for water and what kind of buildup you're going to do that's heavily water-reliant, and you're not going to consider the possibility in the future that climate change is going to seriously affect the amount of water in that part of the world, then you stand the risk of running into some pretty catastrophic effects economically as a result of potentially catastrophic effects of climate change ecologically. I'm on the next slide.

I talked a little bit in my presentation about the lower Athabasca River management framework. There are three stages: green, yellow, and red. The message I wanted to convey was that the framework, as it is now, isn't based on any kind of observational science. It ignores the past trends. It basically ranks all of the historical flow from highest to lowest and then looks at the changes in that trend itself. It doesn't look at how it's changing over time, and it makes some assumptions that if you get a dramatic change in the ranked flow, that represents some sort of ecological effect.

Basically what they've done is design a model that more accurately reflects the geometry of the bed of the river than anything else. It ignores all sorts of ecological processes that are dependent on flow, such as the periodic reflooding of suspended wetlands in the basin, sediment transport, scouring, effects on fisheries, and that sort of thing.

They've arbitrarily decided that 90% of the time, there will be no ecological effect and no need to limit flow extractions; about 5% of the time, they'll have to do some moderate extraction limits; and 5% of the time, historically, there would be more serious extraction limits under the right conditions. I'm now on the next slide. I included these figures in my report. The upper figure is basically the trends in the September flows of the Athabasca. This is to illustrate where they've gone. It's variable, but since about 1970, there's been a downward trend, as I showed.

In the bottom slide, you can see that I've ranked them all. Under the framework, there'd be an arbitrary conclusion that 5% of the time it's in the red, 5% of the time it's in the yellow, and the rest of the time it's green. Green represents fine ecological conditions.

(0935) This ignores the fact that 50% of the last ten years would have been either in yellow or in red. If we're looking to the future in changing water supply, if water supply goes down, the frequency of yellow and red conditions will dramatically increase. A paper in press from the University of Alberta argues that if the current water management framework had been in place in 2000, the Athabasca river flows would have been in yellow or red condition for up to 40 weeks per year and in the red for at least 20 weeks per year.

If climate change causes a 10% decline in flow, it's going to result in a substantial increase in binding flow conditions for the oil industry. I would suggest that this 10% figure is fairly conservative and conceivably a best-case scenario, since we're looking at a 50% decline coming off the basin downstream in the last 30 years, and since expected growth in the oil sands extraction is projected to go up to 2.3 million barrels per day by 2020.

This means one of three things: they're going to have to find some substantial off-stream storage representing approximately 15% of the total annual water supply; they're going to have to reduce the amount of water they pull out of the river by about 50% below currently permitted levels; or they're going to have to find a way to reduce water use to less than 0.2 cubic metres per barrel of oil, which is substantially less than what they're currently using. Basically, my message is that we're on a collision course between declining water supply and rapidly ramping up water consumption demands.

Dave Sauchyn and some others at the University of Regina did some modelling of climate for the prairie provinces. In the northeastern part of Alberta, they're predicting a change from moist sub-humid to dry sub-humid or even semi-arid conditions. The amount of precipitation between northern and southern Alberta is now approximately the same and has been for the last 30 or 40 years. The difference is that the south is a lot warmer and that net water balance means there's less free water and it's much more arid.

In the Palliser's Triangle in southeastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan, if we get increased evaporation and increased temperature in the north, there's going to be less free water, and that means much less surface available for ecological and industrial use. That's the end of my presentation.

(0940) The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Thank you, Dr. Donahue. Dr. Schindler.

Dr. David Schindler (Professor of Ecology, University of Alberta, As an Individual) :

I'm going to show you some photos and maps to illustrate the material that's in the briefs you have. I explain there the reason for our study. This is a natural seep of oil sands, of which there are several along the Athabasca River. Of course, industry's position has been that all of the pollutants in the river come from such natural seeps. To me, as someone who works with watersheds and waters all the time, it's inconceivable that going from a footprint like that in 1974 to that on the same scale in 2008 would not cause a lot of chemical releases from the watershed to the river. We undertook to study that.

I pointed out in my brief the deficiencies of the regional aquatic monitoring program. What we did instead was to take 18 sites up and down the Athabasca River, from above Fort McMurray to the end of the river, and then a few, as you'll see, around Fort Chipewyan, and superimpose them on a geological map. The white area in the centre is the McMurray formation that is the focus of much of the oil sands activity. We also went to every major tributary in that stretch and sampled above the McMurray formation, in the McMurray formation but above oil sands mining, and at the river mouth below any activity.

We had a few reference streams and a half dozen streams that ran through mined areas. I'll just go through these in order to show you a general pattern. These are in the brief. The black bars are winter flows, and the white bars are summer flows. In general, on this and subsequent slides, you'll see that there really is not much evidence of an oil sands effect during the wintertime. As you go from the Fort McMurray end at the bottom to the Fort Chipewyan end at the top, the little side panels represent the various tributaries.

However, if you look at the summer panels, during the period that the river is ice-free you'll see a considerable effect, in this case, on dissolved polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. We chose to study this group of compounds because it contained several known carcinogens that we know are high in bitumen and were also high in previous studies, such as the Exxon Valdez spill and the notorious Wabamun Lake spill. I'm going to flick through these fairly quickly, but look for that consistency in pattern.

Aluminum is not necessarily such a toxic metal, but as you'll see by the red lines, there are some Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment guidelines that are exceeded in most of these samples. Again you'll see the levels pick up greatly going downstream, as you get into the oil sands area in summer, not in winter. Arsenic has much the same pattern, with again about a doubling downstream of the mines during the summertime. For lead, again, a number of the summer values there exceed CCME guidelines.

As for mercury, again you can see very little in the winter, but note the increase as you get into and beyond the oil sands during the summer. Uranium is one about which there has been a fair amount of concern. In this case, you really see no influence of the oil sands either winter or summer. The pattern is pretty consistent, indicating that most of the source is upstream. It's the same for cadmium. Note that cadmium, especially in summer, exceeds CCME guidelines by a considerable amount, but again, there's no clear evidence in this case of a contribution from the oil sands.

(0945) The reason for that winter to summer difference is that the river is encased in ice for about four months--and this winter for practically five months--during the winter season. So things entering tend to accumulate on the ice. There has been a considerable amount of airborne input, which surprised us. This is a snow layer on the Muskeg River. It isn't the worst one we've seen, but you can see the black layers and the black surface on this snow as a result of airborne contamination.

At each of these sites, the same sites as shown in our earliest slide, we took a sample of the total snowpack, melted it down, and then filtered 900 millilitres of each snowpack. These filters were all white when we started. They're very fine--they have about half-micron pores. The yellow numbers are distances between the sites. In this case, Fort McMurray is at the left, going downstream to Fort Chipewyan on the right, and the little side legs are the six major tributaries.

So you can see, visually even, a high contribution of suspended particulates in snow in the area for a considerable distance around the tar sands plants, but note tailing off quite a bit downstream. In the next several panels, again, this is total PAH. In this case, we did a polycyclic aromatic analysis of both the filters, which you saw, and the filtered material, the dissolved portion. The dissolved portion is in red. The particulate portion on the filter is in black. The total concentration is represented by the end of the bar.

Again, you can see this big contribution of airbornes in the vicinity of the tar sands and tailing off going downstream, with Fort Chipewyan at the top, and of course almost nothing upstream of Fort McMurray at the bottom. Again, there is a very similar pattern for aluminum, except that more is in particulate form. For arsenic, you see the same pattern. It is clearly an airborne contribution from the tar sands mining. Lead has much the same pattern. All of these, again, show the CCME guidelines. For mercury, there is a big contribution of mercury via airbornes, largely in the particulate fraction.

Note that these values are very low. They're in parts per trillion. But this isn't where mercury is a problem. It biomagnifies up food chains up to a million-fold. Concentrations as high as these have been shown to result in serious contamination problems in other systems. Again, it indicates that there is some mercury coming from upstream, but a big contribution is from the mining to the airborne mercury loads to the snowpack. Cadmium doesn't show any contribution. The one contribution it shows is just below the outfall for Fort McMurray, and it may represent some sort of urban influence.

Cadmium, of course, is in various parts of automobiles, and so on. So that isn't too surprising. Again, note that most of these values are at or above CCME guidelines for cadmium in parts per billion. There is accumulating evidence that the concentrations of polycyclic aromatics, particularly in their alkaloidal forms, which are very common in this river, are causing deformities in fish. I've given you two references. I could have given you a dozen.

There is clear evidence of deformities in eggs and embryos in contact, particularly, with the particulate forms of PAH right at the sediment surface, which of course is where eggs are laid. This is a government study under the northern river ecosystem initiative, with some actual pictures of deformities.

(0950) The study also indicates that there were deformities in the Athabasca formation upstream of the mines, but that the incidences increased downstream of the mines, indicating that these particulate inputs from the mines are having an influence—up to 95% embryonic mortalities and a high incidence of deformities in the embryos that survived. The CCME has this covered with its interim sediment quality guidelines.

But this same study indicates that both the regional aquatics monitoring program and the Peace-Athabasca Delta program, in measuring the same compounds, found fairly high incidences in which the CCME interim sediment quality guidelines were exceeded. The big concern that I'm sure you heard yesterday in Fort Chipewyan is that some of the cancer rates noted in the community are attributed to some of the compounds, which are at least in part the result of mining activity. We have found big northern pikes loaded with mercury. I don't think the water should be the sole focus of this program.

If you look at all of the problems associated with the oil sands, this is clearly a black star program. You've heard a lot about in situ, and I think in situ has some big implications for water. It's already been shown to have big implications for wildlife. The northwest corner of Fort McMurray will be developed by Opti-Nexen, and this is the sort of developmental intensity that will be a part of these in situ things. High density of well pads and interconnecting roads and pipelines are very inhospitable to wildlife. Almost the whole corridor is alienated.

But it's also big enough to vastly affect supplies of freshwater, both surface water and groundwater. Of more concern than the average flow, in my opinion, is the winter low flows in the Athabasca. Industry is fond of saying that they use only 2% of the average flow of the Athabasca. That's an irrelevant factoid. We know there's lots of water in the Athabasca in summer. In winter, the flows are very low and decline very rapidly, and this is probably the most sensitive point in the river. At this point, industry uses 7% or 8% of the Athabasca's flow. The flows are declining and industry is increasing.

You can see where all this is headed. That's the end of my presentation.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Thank you, Dr. Schindler. Dr. Mary Griffiths.

Dr. Mary Griffiths (As an Individual) :

Yes, that's right. I'll start straightaway. I appreciate the opportunity to present to the committee, and I am speaking today in a personal capacity. I would like to start with my key messages. You know that the Athabasca is required to produce a lot of water for the oil sands, but I want to look at not only the Athabasca but also the influence of the oil sands development on groundwater quantity and quality. I think we're going to see a lot more impacts in the future with the cumulative effects of many projects.

We're not really seeing yet the effects that we can expect in the future, so my real message is that we need a lot more information and a process to implement sound science to ensure that we do have sustainable management of groundwater resources. We can see what's happening in the river. We're getting a lot of warnings. There's a lot of research on the river, but my concern is perhaps more with the groundwater, which is out of sight, and that tends to be more out of mind. By way of background, I think sometimes it is useful to have absolute figures so you'll know what we're talking about.

We know that the water allocated from the Athabasca River basin for the oil sands mining is by far the largest quantity: 550 million cubic metres were allocated by the end of 2007. The allocations already exceed current use, because a lot of projects have got their allocations but they're not yet operating, so therefore we're not yet seeing the impacts on the environment. In 2007 the volume of water actually being used was only roughly 130 million cubic metres, and of that about three-quarters came from the Athabasca River, surface runoff of over 20%, and non-saline groundwater 5%.

This is for the mining operations. So you see, it's not just the Athabasca River that is providing water. I think it's useful to have a comparison to get an idea of what 129 million cubic metres of water is like. The City of Edmonton, which supplies a population of about one million people, including the people around the city, treats every year about 130 million cubic metres, roughly what is being used in 2007 for the oil sands mining. But with the city, the water goes to the waste treatment plant, and only about 10% or less is actually consumed; the rest eventually flows back to the river.

Of course that's not the case with the oil sands mining, because all the water is consumed. It actually gets put into a tailings pond; it does not flow back to the river, so it affects the river flow. Now to the water used for in situ operations. David showed a slide just now to give the impression of how in the future it's going to have a huge impact, because you'll realize that 80% of the bitumen will be coming from in situ operations, not from the mining operations.

In fact, more than 90% of the bitumen area is too deep to mine, and we'll be getting a lot of the bitumen in the future in particular from the in situ operations. In 2007, total water use for the in situ was far less than the mining. The mining, if you remember, was 129 million cubic metres; in situ it's 31 million cubic metres, and half of that was saline groundwater. You might think we don't need to worry so much about saline groundwater, but of course it doesn't get replenished so rapidly, so I think the companies are going to be very concerned on the availability of the saline groundwater.

But of course from the public perspective it's the shallow, non-saline groundwater that's of more concern. In 2007, nine million cubic metres of non-saline groundwater was already being used for in situ operations. To put that in perspective, more groundwater was being used for in situ operations than for oil sands mining even in 2007, and even though we are still only at the early stages of bitumen production. Eventually far more will come from in situ, but in 2007 only 40% was coming from in situ and 60% of the bitumen was coming from mining.

So what will be the impacts on the groundwater quantity as a result of the mining operations? The drawdown of groundwater for in situ projects lasts for the length of a project, and that can be several decades. It will affect both the shallow non-saline aquifers and the deeper saline water. Some projects have used saline water, some use non-saline groundwater, some use surface water, and some use a mixture, but the groundwater recharge is very slow. Groundwater can move very slowly, perhaps one to 35 metres a year, or up to perhaps 130 metres a year in a buried channel aquifer, which we'll see later.

(0955) The groundwater recharge can be affected by the drainage of wetlands. We've already seen a lot of that from the mining operations. It can be affected by use of surface water and surface water flows. Of course, groundwater and rivers are very closely interlinked. If you reduce groundwater, it can affect the volume of water in the river. I think the main problem would be the cumulative impact of so many overlapping projects. When a company does an environmental impact assessment, it looks at its immediate neighbours and sees what impacts their own development will have on the companies immediately around.

But there's no regional modelling to see what the overall cumulative impacts will be of a lot of development, and the use of water in one area can affect the recharge for another area. Then of course climate change will also affect the groundwater precipitation and groundwater recharge. So we need a lot more information about the aquifers in the in situ areas, to provide basic background data. We don't have a lot of good density of data for a long period of time. We need a lot more monitoring and we need surface and groundwater monitoring models, the interrelationship between surface water and groundwater.

We also need to remember that in this region we don't just have what I call horizontal aquifers. The aquifers are interspersed with buried channels and the geology is much more complicated than one would be led to believe by the surface topography because of these glacial meltwater channels, which are filled with sand or till and are not evident on the surface. The next slide just shows briefly the area north of Fort McMurray. Fort McMurray is where the blue comes to the bottom at the centre there. This is an area of about 130 kilometres by about 145 kilometres.

It does not show the area of Cold Lake, which is farther south. But even within this area we've got roughly 20 buried channels, and certainly in the area farther south the Alberta Geological Survey thinks we will still find more buried channels. In the interests of brevity I will not go on further about that now, but I'd be happy to answer more questions about that. I would like just to mention that there are not only considerable concerns about the impacts on groundwater quantity, but also on groundwater quality.

We already know about the release of some oil sands mining operations, and there's the potential and actual leakage of contaminated water from tailings ponds. But within the in situ operations, we have the heating of aquifers that has led in several cases to well blowouts, casings failures, and steam releases. In the Cold Lake area, where they use not SAGD but cyclical steam stimulation, the temperatures are much higher. It releases arsenic, which is naturally occurring in the formation, and then one tends to get an arsenic plume moving down away from the heated area. So there are impacts on groundwater quality.

Of course it's great that we're doing a lot of water recycling to reduce the use freshwater. If one is using saline water and it's going to be used to make steam, it has to be treated before it can be used, and when one recycles water, again, the water has to be treated before it can be used and the waste products of the treatment have either to be sent to landfill or to deep well disposal. So the handling of those wastes also creates further problems. Finally, in the interest of brevity, I will just sum up to say that we expect the scale of operations to increase.

In the latest predictions in the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers they're still looking for perhaps three million barrels of bitumen a day by 2020. That's more than two and a half times what was produced last year. We're going to see a lot more cumulative impacts in the mining areas and even greater in the long term in the in situ, and the expansion could also extend right down to the Edmonton area if as many upgraders go ahead as originally planned. We could also see a lot of water being used from the North Saskatchewan River, which is the river that supplies Edmonton.

So we need to minimize water use for all oil sands operations. We need to improve the monitoring of all water quantity and water quality, and we need much more research to increase our understanding of the cumulative impact, including the surface and groundwater interactions. I do believe there is a role for the federal government in this work. Thank you.

(1000) The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Thank you very much, Dr. Griffiths. I would now like to go to questions, the seven-minute round, beginning with Mr. Trudeau.

Mr. Justin Trudeau :

Thank you. I'd like to get right into it. Dr. Donahue, you spoke about the water management framework. The way you framed it at first was saying that it's only based on the geology and geometry of the rivers and not really taking much into account. Then you went on to say that even with that level of limitations in terms of understanding what it is, we're still in some real trouble with those links to it. Is it worth it, then, to try to improve the framework to understand some of the data you've brought in if it's only going to show us to a greater extent that we're in even greater trouble? What are the next steps on there?

(1005) Mr. William F. Donahue :

My comments were in terms of the framework, and what it appeared to be based on, and ultimately the implications. My point in saying that we're in trouble was to go back to what is science. The basic assumption of the water framework, when they put it together, was that the amount of water isn't changing in the river, historically. The assumption will be that it won't change in the future. On average, 5% of the time we can expect this limitation or that limitation. My point is that simply by saying what years were the lowest flows, and where are we, and what would that mean in terms of trends....

So a very simple consideration of which years were the lowest flows and which were the highs, to contextualize that ranking of the flows, pretty much skewers the framework as it is. So my critique on that one was because we've been spending no time or money on figuring out the state of a water resource upon which we are entirely dependent for this activity, we're now stuck with very little knowledge of what's happened, what's going to happen, and what the implications are. My basic message was that the framework as it is now really isn't of a lot of use. It's very arbitrary.

In terms of where we're going, certainly there's a great need for getting sufficient information to produce what I would consider a valid water management framework. We can't go forward in terms of managing the water or development in the basin that's dependent on water if we don't know what the effects are going to be. I know the Alberta government has come up with an in-stream flow needs water management basin framework technique for southern Alberta and the South Saskatchewan River basin.

It involved detailed sampling, detailed studies of things like the effects of flow on riparian communities, effects of flow on fisheries. Ultimately, though, what you need is to determine where the ecological thresholds are. As flow declines, at some point you can expect an ecological effect on whatever it is you're looking at, whether it's the suspended wetlands and lakes that are in the basin.... Periodic flooding of the river results in a recharge of these systems that keeps all of these vast wetlands healthy.

At what point, as time goes on, does the river no longer exceed its banks in sufficient frequency to affect those things? At what point in the flow do fisheries start to collapse because of loss of habitat or loss of spawning, that sort of thing? At what point are the hydro-dynamics of the river in terms of sediment changes affected so that you're not getting the channelization and all the other things that are necessary for ecological function in the river? The framework as it is considers none of that, simply because we have none of that information.

My basic point was if we want to create a picture of what's going on in the river that is based on an understanding of what's happening in the river, what's most sensitive in the river, if we don't have that picture, we can't possibly hope to manage the river properly.

In one of the previous questions from the presenters before was something along the lines of, with $120 billion in development planned, and the industry contributing tens of millions of dollars to research, the amount of money being contributed to what I would call valid environmental research is a drop in the bucket of what's going into the industrial research. Provincially, we've seen water sampling for lakes in Alberta get cut 70% or 80% just in the last few weeks.

If you're looking at trying to figure out what's going on with a resource that forms a foundation of a $100-billion-plus industry, you'd better start putting some serious thought and money into it.

Mr. Justin Trudeau :

You're saying it was done in the southern regions, but it hasn't been done around the oil sands area.

Mr. William F. Donahue :

Yes, and that's simply because I think a lot of it was out of sight, out of mind. The presumption is there's a lot of water in the north, it's water-rich; therefore, we don't really need to address it all that much.

(1010) Mr. Justin Trudeau :

Thank you. Dr. Schindler, yesterday afternoon we had presentations from various leaders and elders in the Fort Chipewyan area, and they brought up a number of anecdotal examples of fish deformities and concerns around that. Obviously your charts with the parts per billion and parts per trillion indicate the impacts of the magnification of those effects that go up the food chain. I know you mentioned the larval examples of contamination and bitumen. I'm just wondering about the transition between what the native wisdom is telling us anecdotally around deformations and concretely in Lake Athabasca.

Dr. David Schindler :

We did take fish samples as part of the study and we're analysing them as we speak. I don't have any results back yet, except to know that some of the fish are very, very high in mercury, and we're looking to see if they've increased over previous studies. We have archived samples of fish and also mercury analyses that have gone back for almost 20 years now. In a couple of months we should know the answer to that.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Thank you. Mr. Ouellet, please. I would remind those in attendance that there are interpreters and there are devices available at the back if you need them for the

interpretation from one language to another.

Mr. Christian Ouellet :

You better use it, because I'm dangerous. I'm going to speak French. [ Translation ] Are you following me in French? First, Dr. Griffiths, I would like to ask you something. At the end of your presentation, you say that the federal government's role is important—

[ English ]

Dr. Mary Griffiths :

I was not going to go into the federal role in detail because I know that somebody else tomorrow is going to be speaking to that. I think there is a role through the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. As well, of course, there's a trigger with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on water quality. There is also sometimes an opportunity for the toxic substances with the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, as well as, of course, for the federal role for the first nations people and transboundary waters. There are a lot of ways in which the federal government can get involved.

What interests me the most is the work that has been done by Natural Resources Canada, and a Dr. Alfonso Rivera, in groundwater aquifer monitoring. There have been a number of aquifers monitored across Canada. There's a plan to do about 30 of them. One of them that has been identified is within the Athabasca oil sands region, but that has not yet been tackled. I would hope that perhaps there will be an opportunity for the federal government to work probably with the Alberta Geological Survey. The Alberta Geological Survey has been doing some great work as well, but they are also limited in their resources.

There is so much work that needs to be done. If we could get additional resources for monitoring and learning more about our groundwater aquifers in the oil sands region—not just in the Athabasca area but also in the Peace River and the Cold Lake area—I think this would be really valuable.

[ Translation ]

Mr. Christian Ouellet :

Thank you very much. So that means that, in your opinion, the federal government has an important role to play in research. It must determine how we should behave with water.

[ English ]

Dr. Mary Griffiths :

I think the research will help us to make better decisions. At the moment, I don't think we have enough information on the cumulative impacts. More projects are approved, but we don't know enough about the cumulative impact of so many projects going ahead, especially on groundwater. There was a plan by some companies working on in situ operations south of Fort McMurray to develop a model to link surface and groundwater, but there were never any resources for that to go ahead. They got to stage one, decided that it was an important thing to do, but it has not gone ahead.

But I was pleased that industry actually recognized there was a need here. Even for each individual environmental impact assessment, they are not looking at the overall implications on a watershed basis or a regional area. That needs to be done.

(1015) [ Translation ]

Mr. Christian Ouellet :

Thank you. What you're telling us is important. Dr. Schindler, do you also see a specific role that the federal government could play in your research?

[ English ]

Dr. David Schindler :

The monitoring of the river was actually started in a very good fashion by the federal government, but over the years they've gradually turned the monitoring over to the province of Alberta, which in turn has turned a lot of it over to industry itself. As a result, we have a database that's not available to independent scientists to see. We have no public transparency in the database. I think there's a clear role for the federal government indicated simply by how close this development is to the Northwest Territories, which is clearly within federal jurisdiction.

Those huge tailings ponds and, as I showed, input pollutants to the Athabasca River going downstream clearly pose a threat to the territories. If the federal government doesn't have a clear role in Alberta, it clearly has one in the Northwest Territories. That being said, on the compounds like the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that I showed, the best experts in Canada belong to the federal Department of the Environment and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. I find it rather scandalous that those people are not involved in this area.

The reason they're not involved is that they have insufficient budget to allow them to operate.

[ Translation ]

Mr. Christian Ouellet :

Thank you. Mr. Donahue, may I ask you the same question?

[ English ]

Mr. William F. Donahue :

I would say yes, the federal government does have a role. The climate data, especially, that I showed as an example was from Environment Canada. One of the things I noticed when I was going through the climate data was that starting from the 1970s, going up to the mid-1990s or before that, in many of these monitoring sites there was data going back almost a century; but in the mid-1990s, I can only presume that budget cuts were the reason there began to be bigger and bigger gaps in the data.

For example, regarding the snowpack for much of the prairie, if you look at historical data, it's there, it's regular, it's always there, and it's a great database. Starting in the mid-1990s, for increasingly more and more stations, there was data missing. What I thought was ironic was that in some cases there would be data for the summer for snowpack but not for the winter. So you'd have no data for the winter and then a bunch of zeros for the summer. Is that a monitoring program? Maybe, but ultimately you can't really get to conclusions if you don't have the data. The currency of scientists is data.

Routine monitoring of things such as climate and river flow aren't exciting. It's a constant cost, and I assume there are bean-counters in bureaucracies who wonder if we're getting a bang for our buck with this. So in many cases that's the first thing that gets cut. I showed the data on the river flows. You'll notice that the data for the Sunwapta River stopped around 1995-96. Again, that was because that station was pulled. It's the only station from which we had substantial data for glacial meltwater in the Rockies.

After two or three decades, you begin to be able to interpret trends and the data becomes more and more valuable. If you cut it off, you're left with a vacuum. That station has since been put back in—two years ago, I think. At a critical point, all these long-term data sets are becoming more and more valuable. Unfortunately, over the last 10 to 15 years, the data sets have become more and more spotty. So for me in terms of this kind of work, that's the simplest recommendation.

In terms of other things, there has been almost an evisceration of freshwater research capacity in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Environment Canada. Why is that? I assume it's a budgetary thing, but I don't know.

(1020) The Vice-Chair (Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia) :

Thank you very much. I'm sure there will be follow-up questions. We have to move on now to Ms. Duncan for seven minutes.

Ms. Linda Duncan :

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thank all three of you for your time. I'm sure Dr. Schindler would rather be in the field. It's very appreciated that you would take the time to be before us instead. Dr. Schindler, you're an incredibly modest man, but you are an internationally renowned ecologist. We're fortunate to have you at the University of Alberta. We heard in earlier presentations from the engineering side that the innovation centre is getting tens of millions of dollars. Are you and your scientists getting similar volumes of money from the federal government and from industry to look at the ecological impacts of the tar sands?

Dr. David Schindler :

No, we're not. I haven't really applied for any in industry for 20 years. They funded some of my research 30 years ago in the early days of the oil sands. It's not a place I want to go for money. I want to maintain my independence to do the research and publish the research that I think is necessary.

Ms. Linda Duncan :

Has the federal government been providing substantial amounts of funds for your science work?

Dr. David Schindler :

A small part of it has come from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. Most of the rest of it I've raised from foundations such as Ducks Unlimited and the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation.

Ms. Linda Duncan :

If we were to recommend that there be more substantial money towards looking at this side, would that be helpful in moving forward the research, improving the monitoring, and so forth?

Dr. David Schindler :

It would, but there are also some aspects of the federal funding that I don't like. For example, for anything bigger than an ordinary discovery grant, they want letters of endorsement from clients such as oil sands companies to say how great your research is. Well, if four or five times you've found out bad things about the industry, it's hard to get those letters. Also, at my age, I want to do the research, not run around schmoozing people to get letters of support. With foundations, you can usually raise the same money with a simple letter outlining what you want to do, and that's what I've chosen to do.

Ms. Linda Duncan :

We had a helicopter tour over the tar sands yesterday, which was really helpful. From that and from having read your presentations, something that really struck me and that I hadn't thought of before is the impact of the mining and the loss of streams. In one of your presentations, somebody showed us how, just over a four-year or five-year period recently, the streams that feed into the river are gone. I know from my work in the Wabamun area the impact of the mining on the lake regime and the water table. I'm wondering whether that is being factored into these water models, not just climate change and so forth.

Does this have any impact on the ecology and on the eventual water levels of the river?

Dr. David Schindler :

I'm sure it has. About 50% of that area is underlain by peatlands, including the forested areas, probably at a mean depth of three or four metres. These have taken 3,000 or 4,000 years to accumulate. They act like a giant sponge, absorbing snowpack and the rainfall that falls in thunderstorms and releasing the moisture slowly over time. Industry knows full well, based on research that they have funded by a number of consultants, that they can't restore that sort of ecosystem, not unless they wait 3,000 or 4,000 years.

There's no hope of reconstructing the hydrology of those systems, or for that matter the aquifers, because the layers are dug up and put in a pile; there's no attempt to put them back in strata that would restore the aquifers. This probably wouldn't be a big concern if it were in a small area, but of course it's no longer a small area. I predict it will disrupt the whole hydrology of that lower Athabasca system.

(1025) Ms. Linda Duncan :

So it basically can't be reclaimed to serve the watershed.

Dr. David Schindler :

I don't believe it can, and I think it's so unrealistic to expect it that it's time for some new restoration goals. We have a history in this country of never having enough money put aside to reclaim after mining. We have several cases that have been outlined in the 2002 Auditor General's report. All of them were tiny compared with this operation. The cost of the small part that has been certified reclaimed—Syncrude's Buffalo site—was ten times what's being put aside, and yet it's acknowledged that it was an easy site to reclaim. I really fear that two generations from now we'll still be looking at huge mine pits in that area.

Ms. Linda Duncan :

Okay, thanks. Dr. Griffiths, it's lovely to see you. Thank you for coming out of your retirement to help us out. It's very appreciated. We haven't looked at the North Saskatchewan River, and it's helpful that you mentioned it. I think it's important for us to understand the scale and the b