Shrinking the footprint

Robert Vassov digs his fingers into the rich, black soil and lifts up a thin layer of moss. It looks like a typical forest floor — that's probably why he's so proud of it.

"We're getting a lot of the bryophytes, the mosses, coming back," he says, proudly. "We're starting to develop this forest floor layer." Out of that layer grows a thick stand of jack pine, home to colourful butterflies, busy bugs and chattering squirrels.

This whole region was a barren sandy hill just 19 years ago, says Vassov, a reclamation scientist with Syncrude. It's a sharp contrast to the neighbourhood-sized mine pit just a block away, or the lifeless Mildred Lake tailings pond just over the hill.

The oilsands have left a significant mark on the environment. Companies are now investing billions to reduce this ecological footprint and tread more lightly on the Earth.

Restoring the land

Mining the oilsands means digging up the boreal forest on top of it. How much depends on the technology used: a surface mine could strip an area the size of a subdivision, while an in-situ well pad might clear a crescent's worth.

Oilsands development has disturbed about 602 square kilometres of land, according to Alberta Energy — an area a little smaller than Edmonton. Of that, just 1.04 sq. km are officially reclaimed — about half of Legal, in other words.

It's not as bad as it looks. "It takes 20 years to grow a tree," explains Don Thompson of the Oilsands Developers Group, so it takes many years to reclaim a region. The province has also asked for decades of monitoring before they will certify an oilsands site as reclaimed. About 67 sq. km of industry land is at various stages of reclamation, according to Alberta Energy.

For surface mines, Vassov says, reclamation means backfilling pits with tailings and covering it with stockpiled soil and peat. Crews then plant thousands of trees, usually jack pine, and other native plants, such as blueberry. Companies have recently learned to mix woody debris from other forests in with the soil, he adds. The debris acts as a seed bank, and can help restore many hard-to-find native species.

Careful monitoring suggests that they're on the right track, Vassov says; their reclaimed forests appear to be growing as good or better than wild ones. "I'm confident this is going to grow into a mature jack pine forest."

But it's not a complete restoration, say biologists. About 65 per cent of the disturbed region was originally wetland, says Suzanne Bayley, a University of Alberta ecologist who's studied the region for decades. Those wetlands contained thick layers of peat, the structure of which was destroyed when it was scraped off. Companies have yet to figure out how to restore that structure; until they do, they won't be able to completely restore boreal wetlands.

Syncrude is now attempting to make a large peat-based wetland in its east mine pit, Vassov says. They've transplanted peat from another region in sod-like chunks to preserve its structure, and hope to start planting trees on it in a few years. "This is the first time it's ever been done to this magnitude."

Companies have had some success creating freshwater marshes, Bayley notes, which are similar to peat wetlands. "Wetlands could be done if they put the effort into it and the government made them do it," she says, but it would not be easy or cheap. "The cost of this reclamation is going to be staggeringly high."

Clearing the air

It's tough to miss the eight-storey silver smokestack on the Syncrude site. It sends an ominous plume of white smoke high into the sky that's visible from tens of kilometres away.

Upgraders and tailings ponds create many air pollutants, says Warren Kindzierski, a professor of environmental health who's studied the oilsands. His research suggests that average levels of most of those pollutants in the oilsands region are too low to affect human health, and are at or below levels found near Edmonton. "For those classes of pollutants, there really isn't much concern."

That's due in part to technologies like flue gas desulphurization, says David Spink, a St. Albert air quality consultant who monitors air near Fort McKay. It's basically a giant filter that runs sulphur dioxide (SO2), an ingredient in acid rain, through lime, to make gypsum.

The aforementioned silver smokestack at Syncrude is one of them. (The smoke coming out of it is mostly water vapour.) The company is adding a second one to its operations this year for $1.6 billion, which should cut its SO2 emissions by 60 per cent.

One pollutant that is an issue, say Kindzierski and Spink, is hydrogen sulphide, or H2S. It stinks like rotten eggs and has caused smell complaints throughout the region. H2S and total reduced sulphur levels exceeded provincial air quality guidelines about 1,870 times last year, according to the Wood Buffalo Environmental Association, and have caused numerous complaints from Fort McKay residents. Many of the recent problems have been linked to tailings ponds at the Suncor site, Spink said.

Suncor recently installed a new air scrubber to keep more sulphur out of its tailings ponds, says Jessica Potter of Alberta Environment, which has significantly reduced its smell problems — there have been no recorded instances of H2S exceeding allowed levels since this May. "They're definitely making significant gains towards solving the problem."

Greenhouse gas emissions in the oilsands mostly come from upgrading bitumen and steam production for in-situ recovery. The industry now creates just five per cent of Canada's emissions, according to Environment Canada, but that's set to change — the oilsands are the fastest growing source of emissions in the country. It's also moving towards in-situ mining as surface sources dry up, and, according to the Pembina Institute, in-situ mines produce three times more emissions per barrel than surface ones.

New discoveries should help address these problems, Thompson says. Petrobank Energy and Resources uses toe-to-heel air injection to inject air underground instead of steam, for example, then lights part of the bitumen deposit on fire to melt the rest of it. "They have essentially gotten rid of the use of natural gas," he says, cutting their emissions in half. Other companies are experimenting with electricity or solvents to reduce emissions and water use.

Lighter steps

Technological advances have made the oilsands far more efficient in recent years, according to Drew Zieglgansberger of Cenovus Energy. In the last five years, for example, his in-situ company has cut its per-barrel SO2 emissions by 70 per cent, its land use by 23 per cent, and its fresh water use 91 per cent.

But the industry is also growing at a rapid pace — production is set to double to about three million barrels a day by 2018, according to Alberta Energy, which could outpace these per-barrel improvements. "The big wave has yet to hit," Spink says.

Industry isn't doing a bad job with managing its ecological footprint, Spink says, but it could do better given the technology that's available. "Until industry can convince the public that they're doing the best job possible, the public will always be skeptical."

Oilsands extraction means destroying significant chunks of the boreal forest, Spink says — perhaps permanently. If we want to get that oil, it's incumbent on us to do it responsibly. "It's going to cost more, but in terms of responsible environmental management, that's what [industry] should be doing."