From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Deborah Jaremko

New standards to build on rules already in place for other mining sectors

In what the former Chief of the Fort McKay First Nation calls “a critical step in the right direction,” the Alberta government is moving to accelerate reclamation of more than 1.3 trillion litres of water stored in oil sands tailings ponds.

On Sept. 5, the province announced it will expedite setting standards that allow for “mine water” to be treated and released into the environment, building on the rules that are already in place for other mining operations across Canada.

“We cannot ignore this challenge, we need to keep working together to find practical and effective solutions that protect Indigenous rights, people and the environment,” said Chief Jim Boucher, a member of Alberta’s Oil Sands Mine Water Steering Committee.

That committee is behind a suite of nine recommendations that Alberta is putting into action to improve mine water management and tailings pond reclamation.

The Mining Association of Canada (MAC) says decades of research give the industry confidence that mine water can be safely treated and released once regulations are in place.

But that will take the federal government moving faster too.

Both the federal and provincial governments play a role in potential regulations for the treatment and release of oil sands mine water.

“Alberta is proposing science-based parameters to ensure the safe return of treated water used in oil sands mining, just as other provincial governments do for their respective mining sectors,” MAC CEO Pierre Gratton said in a statement.

“We are hopeful that this will accelerate the development of federal regulations – which we requested almost 15 years ago – to be similarly advanced.”

Gratton said setting standards for safe mine water release could unlock “significant investments” in oil sands reclamation and water treatment.

What are tailings ponds?

Tailings are a byproduct of mining operations around the world.

Oil sands tailings ponds are engineered basins holding a mix of mine water, sand, silt, clay and residual bitumen generated during the extraction process. There are eight operating oil sands mines with tailings ponds in northern Alberta.

Recycling water held in these basins helps operators reduce the amount of fresh water withdrawn from the Athabasca River.

In 2023, 79 per cent of the water used for oil sands mining was recycled, according to the Alberta Energy Regulator.

What is oil sands mine water?

Oil sands mine water is water that comes into contact with the various stages of oil sands mining operations, including bitumen extraction and processing.

Tailings ponds in the oil sands also hold water from significant amounts of rain and snow collected in the decades since the first mines began operating.

While the oil sands mining sector has reduced the amount of fresh water it uses per barrel of oil produced by nearly one-third since 2013, the total volume of mine water in tailings storage has grown as production has increased.

What’s in oil sands mine water? 

The constituents of oil sands mine water requiring treatment for safe release are both typical of water in other industrial processes and unique to the oil sands sector.

MAC says common materials are suspended solids like sand, silt and clay, as well as a range of metals. These can be treated by a wide range of proven technologies already in use in Canada and globally.

Unique to oil sands mine water are organic compounds such as naphthenic acids. According to MAC, operators have demonstrated and continue to invest in processes to treat these to levels safe for environmental release.

How does mine water impact reclamation? 

At the end of an oil sands mine’s life, operators must remove all infrastructure and restore the land to features of a self-sustaining boreal forest similar to what was there before.

Addressing the challenge of tailings ponds and the mine water stored in them is critical to the overall success of oil sands mining reclamation.

Why is mine water release important?

MAC says the only way to remove mine water in tailings ponds is to treat it for safe release to the environment.

Strict regulations allow for this process across Canadian copper, nickel, gold, iron ore, and diamond mining operations. But it is prohibited in the oil sands.

The safe release of treated oil sands mine water into the environment can reduce the need to store it, minimize further land disturbance and help reclamation happen faster.

MAC says operators have shown they can treat mine water to safe release levels, using processes that include innovative technologies developed through Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance.

What is Alberta doing? 

Alberta has accepted the Oil Sands Mine Water Steering Committee’s nine recommendations aimed at speeding up solutions for safe mine water release.

The province says the recommendations, developed with input from industry, technology providers, Indigenous communities and scientists, will now be evaluated to determine how they can be put into practice.

Read the full recommendations here.

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

The federal Liberal government “committed over $160 billion… to support our green economy” from 2015 to 2024, and proposes to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, all on the premise that there’s a climate change crisis. And it’s spent many millions trying to convince Canadians there’s a climate emergency. But is that true?

A recent report (authored by John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick and Roy Spencer) and disseminated by the U.S. Department of Energy provides a very different view.

The report examined how carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions (as a result of human activity) have affected or will affect climate, extreme weather and other metrics of societal wellbeing. While the report examines the United States, other research suggests what most people intuitively know—because Canada’s climate is colder, global warming could produce higher benefits and lower costs for Canada than the U.S. For example, Canada’s agriculture and tourism industries would likely benefit from warmer temperatures.

So what does the report say? One observation is that “most extreme weather events in the U.S. do not show long-term trends. Claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by U.S. historical data.” Moreover, “forest management practices are often overlooked in assessing changes in wildfire activity.” The same could be said in Canada. There’s good evidence that bad government management of forests—rather than primarily climate change—is to blame for much of the recent wildfire activity.

The authors of the report further emphasize that claims of human activity causing climate disasters are shaky: “Attribution of climate change or extreme weather events to human CO2 emissions is challenged by natural climate variability, data limitations, and inherent model deficiencies.”

A separate article in Regulation Magazine by policy analyst David Kemp makes the same point. Kemp notes that according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), even under an implausible worst-case climate change scenario, it would not be until 2050 to 2100 that heavy rain increases to a point where a real upward trend, beyond what would be considered natural statistical noise, would emerge. For droughts, cyclones, severe storms, river floods, landslides and fire weather, it would take until at least 2100.

The Department of Energy report also finds that “global climate models generally run ‘hot’ in their description of the climate of the past few decades—too much warming at the surface and too much amplification of warming in the lower- and mid-troposphere.” In general, therefore, many projections of future global warming and associated economic damages are “exaggerated.”

In the final chapter of their report, the authors conclude government actions in the U.S., including aggressive regulatory measures, “are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.”

In Canada, government policies would have only a fraction of the “undetectably small” impacts U.S. government policies could have on climate. As of 2022, Canada accounted for only 1.4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with emissions from China (19.2 times higher) and the U.S. (8.4 times higher) much higher than emissions from Canada. That’s unsurprising given Canada’s much smaller population and economy.

When federal politicians or climate activists next claim there’s a climate crisis or climate emergency, or that the latest weather disaster was the result of climate change due to human activity, and that government must take significant and costly measures to reduce climate change, Canadians should be skeptical. The evidence simply does not support such claims.

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute