The oilsands industry is not responsible for high cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan, says a scientific panel, but will be major a risk to Alberta's water, air and finances if it's not better managed.
The Royal Society of Canada released a 438-page study on the environmental and health impacts of the Alberta oilsands industry Wednesday. The study, done for free by an all-star panel of scientists, involved a two-year review of existing research.
The study debunks a number of long-held beliefs about the oilsands, such as the idea that pollution from oilsands had caused elevated cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan.
There's no credible evidence of that, says Steve Hrudey, chair of the panel and a renowned professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Alberta.
"We're not saying that cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan are elevated or not," he says, after a recent Alberta Health Services study found that they were. "What we're saying is that causation of cancer in Fort Chipewyan cannot be attributed to oilsands contamination based on the available evidence."
That's of little comfort to the people living there, says John Rigney, special projects manager for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. "When most of the people in the community are dying of cancer, it starts to cause a lot of concern here, and we're looking for answers."
Plenty of gaps
The study looked at a broad range of impacts, including health, financial and environmental.
Industrial water use was not yet a threat to life in the Athabasca River, the report found, and would not be a threat if the province implemented and enforced its proposed water management framework. (That plan is currently under development.) "It's manageable," Hrudey says.
Rigney questioned this conclusion, noting that residents already have problems navigating the river today due to low water levels. "We can't reach lots of places where people have settled for the last 200 to 300 years."
Industry should be able to restore the oilsands region back to natural conditions, Hrudey says, but it might take them 50 to 100 years to do so.
It'll also be expensive, he says, and the province isn't doing enough to protect itself from the financial risk. The Energy and Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) will be on the hook for $16.4 billion in reclamation costs if the industry goes bankrupt, the report found, and has just $40.9 million held in security to cover them.
"This is straightforward accounting," he says. "If we don't collect adequate money as [companies] are making profits … the taxpayer of Alberta could be left holding the bag."
And the pace of reclamation has fallen far short of industry expansion, Hrudey says. "We're getting more and more land covered by tailings ponds, and that has to stop." Many companies plan to use end-pit lakes to reclaim tailings ponds, he notes, but no one has shown that they work — not even 17 years after the ERCB conditionally approved the technology. "If it doesn't work, there's no plan B."
More oversight needed
Don Thompson, president of the Oilsands Developers Group and a St. Albert resident, praised the report's factual basis, saying that it would benefit the industry in the long term. "The reality check is that we're doing a pretty good job in protecting people's health and the health of the environment in the Fort McMurray region."
This report does not reflect well on Alberta, Hrudey says. "We're not doing a good enough job." Provincial and federal regulators needed to step up their research into groundwater, reclamation and health impacts, and greatly improve their environmental impact assessments, which had "serious deficiencies" in how they look at potential disasters and health, social and economic impacts.
The province has already approved a doubling of oilsands production using those flawed assessments, says Simon Dyer of the Pembina Institute. "It really suggests a need to slow down and stop approving new projects until we fix some of these fundamental problems."
Rigney echoed the report's call for better monitoring, particularly by the federal government. "We need the federal government to enforce its laws."
The study can be found at www.rsc.ca.
