The Sturgeon River has half as much oxygen in it now than it did three years ago, says a group of student researchers, but that could be due to this year’s heavy rains.
Members of the Sturgeon Watershed Environmental Education Team (SWEET) presented their research on the Sturgeon to city staff this week. The team is composed of Biology 20 IB students from St. Albert Catholic High School and has been doing research on the river since 2008.
The team took water samples from two locations along the Sturgeon, says team member Daniel Roth, and put them through a battery of tests.
The team found that levels of dissolved oxygen in the river had dropped to about 4.7 milligrams per litre at the Big Lake Environmental Support Society’s viewing platform from about 8.1 mg last year and 8.8 mg in 2008. Water from the Kingswood site showed similar results.
That’s a drastic drop, Roth says, given that anything less than five is harmful to aquatic life, according to provincial water quality guidelines. “We’ve dipped below the acceptable limit which, if not rectified quickly, could cause major biological harm.”
Oxygen levels in the Sturgeon were pretty stable from 2008 to 2010, Roth notes, so the team wasn’t sure why they dropped so quickly. One possibility is the large amount of rain and snow we got this year: if water volumes rose but the amount of oxygen-making plants stayed the same, there would be less oxygen per litre of water.
A previously released study by researchers from NAIT also found low oxygen levels in the Sturgeon. Neither group was sure if these levels were persistent or the start of a trend.
Environmental manager Leah Jackson says she’s not sure why oxygen levels dipped this year. “The information I had over the last six years [shows that] typically it’s above guidelines.”
The city’s main impact on oxygen levels in the river is fertilizer, Jackson says, as it encourages plant growth and oxygen-sucking plant decay. City residents should use less fertilizer to reduce this impact.
The SWEET team’s research will continue next year, Roth says.
The province will give carbon-capture projects double credits when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, says the premier — a move environmentalists say makes those projects pointless.
Premier Ed Stelmach announced a change to the province’s carbon credit system at the opening of the new phase of the Shell Scotford upgrader near Fort Saskatchewan Friday. The Quest carbon capture and storage (CCS) project is linked to that upgrader.
As of now, any large-scale CCS project associated with bitumen will get two credits for every credit worth of carbon dioxide they inject underground.
Andy Ridge, director of the province’s climate change secretariat, confirmed this would let a CCS project like Shell’s claim credit for eliminating two tonnes of emissions while only actually eliminating one.
“It’s a bridging mechanism,” he says. Carbon prices are now too low for companies to justify doing CCS, yet CCS is the only way Alberta will see substantive emission reductions in the future. (CCS accounts for about 70 per cent of the province’s planned emission reductions by 2050, according to Alberta Environment.)
“We know we’re borrowing from the future,” he said, but many CCS projects won’t happen without this kind of incentive.
The extra credits will only be available for 10 years, Ridge says, and only to companies that inject at least one megatonne of CO2 a year. Companies that inject to get more oil out of the ground, such as the one associated with the North West Upgrader, will not qualify, as they already have an incentive.
While CCS is important, says Chris Severson-Baker of the Pembina Institute, there are better ways to promote it. “It basically wipes out the emission reductions for the project,” he says, as you allow another tonne of pollution for every tonne you eliminate. “It’s like we’ve lost sight of the reason to do this in the first place.”
Industry, the province and researchers agree that CCS will not catch on unless there is a sufficiently high price on carbon emissions to justify it, Severson-Baker says. If Alberta wants more CCS, it needs to raise its price on carbon.
Stelmach rejected that idea, saying that it would put Alberta at a competitive disadvantage. “We can’t increase our levy on carbon without the rest of the world doing it.”
