Environmental impact raised

James Wood, December 28, 2007, Leader Post -- With continuing sky-high energy prices and a new provincial government eager to promote oilsands development, Saskatchewan appears to be on the verge of following in the footsteps of Alberta and seeing significant oilsands projects in the northern boreal forest.

But with a staggering environmental impact from the Alberta oilsands projects, environmental groups hope Saskatchewan can avoid the serious problems that have occurred next door.

Colleen Rickard, program director with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (C-PAWS) in Saskatchewan, wonders about the wisdom of more oilsands development, given the further greenhouse gas emissions that will come both from the projects themselves and the fossil fuels they will ultimately put into the system.

But she suspects such development will go ahead with the full support of the government.

"The question becomes: How do we do this in a way that is going to be as sustainable as possible from an environmental perspective?" Rickard said in a recent interview.

The projects used to extract the tarry oil known as bitumen have major environmental impacts on the air, land and water.

The oilsands development being considered for Saskatchewan is different from the Alberta megaprojects around Fort McMurray that most people identify with the oilsands.

There would be no open-pit strip mining because of the underground depth of Saskatchewan's bitumen deposits. Instead, what is being considered are in-situ projects, similar to some in Alberta, which would see steam and other solvents injected from the surface to allow the bitumen to flow.

However, that doesn't mean the environmental issues don't exist.

"You're not going to be impacting the same way strip mining is but you're going to be impacting huge areas and they're going to be fragmented," Rickard said.

It begins in the exploration stage with large amounts of drilling and seismic activity and the infrastructure that entails, she said.

"Then they build the well-pad sites, which is the point at which those horizontal wells are actually set into the ground and then down into the formation. And every one of those well-pad sites clears an area of the forest. They also have a road coming to it because they have to maintain it over the time period and then above ground as well they have to pump steam from the central processing facility to the well-pad site to get the steam underground. And then once they pull the bitumen out of the ground they need other pipes. So there's lots of things on the surface all over the place covering a huge area," she said.

That has a huge effect on wildlife, such as woodland caribou and bird species, Rickard said.

Simon Dyer of the Pembina Institute, an Alberta environmental group that closely watches that province's oilsands projects, said there is still a major amount of water used in the production of steam for the in-situ projects, which also impacts greenhouse gas production.

Dyer said there needs to be both federal and provincial regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from large industrial operations such as the oilsands projects. He cautions that the provincial government will have a hard time meeting Saskatchewan's commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 32 per cent by 2020 if unregulated oilsands projects come on line. The previous NDP government committed to those climate change targets last June and the new Saskatchewan Party government has said it will abide by them.