In the Tar Patch, Bitumen Comes Before Fish

Just about every agency in Canada has expressed alarm about water use in the tar sands.

The Petroleum Technology Alliance of Canada, a Calgary-based nonprofit research group, declares water use and reuse to be the region’s biggest issue, because “bitumen production can be much more fresh water intensive than other oil production operations.”

The National Energy Board, no radical group, has questioned the sustainability of water withdrawals for bitumen mining.

The World Wildlife Fund warns that warming temperatures “will significantly reduce both water quality and water quantity in the region.”

Downstream users are already sounding alarm bells about water quality.

“Everybody is convinced that the oil sands is having an impact on the basin,” says Michael Miltenberger, minister of environment and natural resources for the government of the Northwest Territories. “We have tremendous concerns in terms of the pace of development and contamination issues. What happens on the Athabasca affects people as far away as Inuvik.”

The open-pit mines that scar the banks of the Athabasca River north of Fort McMurray are water consumers as formidable as California irrigation projects.

Shell’s Albian Sands project will not only destroy 31,000 acres of water-conserving forest and wetlands but drink nearly 1.9 billion cubic feet of water a year from the Athabasca River.

In addition to trashing 320 acres of fish habitat along the Muskeg and Firebag rivers, Imperial’s Kearl project will suck up another 3.7 billion cubic feet from the Athabasca River (2.3 per cent of the river’s flow) as well as 317 million cubic feet of groundwater. Kearl will also destroy enough forest, fens, bogs, and wetlands to cover twenty thousand football fields.

CRNL’s Horizon mine, in addition to destroying much of the Tar River and its tributaries, the Calumet River and its tributaries, a tributary to the Pierre River, an unnamed tributary to the Athabasca, and an unnamed lake, will suck up 3.2 billion cubic feet of water from the Athabasca River. The mine will also reduce groundwater flow into the river by a million cubic feet a day.

Bitumen is one of the most water-intensive hydrocarbons on the planet. (Shale oil is a close second. Colorado shale-oil developments proposed by Shell and Exxon, for example, will use as much water as the tar sands and already threaten what’s left of the depleted Colorado River.) On average, the open-pit mines require twelve barrels of water to make one barrel of molasses-like bitumen.

Most of the water is needed for a hot-water process (similar to that of a giant washing machine) that separates the hydrocarbons from sand and clay. Although companies such as Syncrude recycle their water as many as eighteen times, every barrel of bitumen consumes a net average of three barrels of potable water. Given that the industry produces one million barrels of bitumen a day, the tar sands industry virtually exports three million barrels of
water from the Athabasca River daily

The tar sands industry accounts for more than 76 percent of the water allocations on the Athabasca River. Current permits allow industry to suck out 2.3 billion barrels of fresh water a year, enough to supply two cities the size of Calgary. Planned expansions could bring the total to 3.3 billion barrels per year, a volume Natural Resources Canada admits “would not be sustainable because the Athabasca River does not have sufficient flows.”

For nearly a decade, scientists, as well as environmental and Aboriginal groups, have asked the government to study how these city-scale withdrawals are impacting the river’s health and instream flows. To date, nobody can say with any certainty whether the province’s promiscuous permission-granting has left enough water in the Athabasca for the fish.

In the wintertime, water levels drop so low that by 2015 industry will be withdrawing more than 12 percent of the river’s flow.