Indigenous environmental activists offer counter-programming to industry-funded tar sands tailings conference
The International Oil Sands Tailing Conference, which occurred on Dec. 9 and 10 at the University of Alberta, is partially funded by the Pathways Alliance.
On Dec. 9 and 10, the University of Alberta hosted the International Oil Sands Tailing Conference, which prompted a piece of counter-programming from Indigenous and environmental activists on its second day.
Keepers of the Water, Indigenous Climate Action and Council of Canadians convened a Dec. 10 news conference downstairs from the two-day tailings conference, which occurred on the second floor of the UAlberta Students’ Union Building at Dinwoodie Lounge.
Oil sands tailings—the toxic sludge leftover from oil mining that includes chemical combinations of mercury, benzene, arsenic and naphthenic acids—are a major concern due to their impact on Indigenous communities’ water and food supply, as well as the growing cost of cleaning them up.
“No one here is opposed to scientific research aimed at finding solutions for oil sands tailings. Important, useful research is being produced on many aspects of the problem,” UAlberta professor emerita in political science Laurie Adkin said at the counter-conference.
“I know this because I reviewed the conference program, but comprehensive solutions acceptable to affected communities have not emerged or have not been implemented.”
A cursory glance at the event’s sponsors reveals that the tailing conference was analogous to arsonists hosting a forum on fire safety.
The conference’s platinum sponsor was Mikisew ConeTec, a partnership between the Mikisew Cree First Nation, Edmonton-based geo-engineering firm ConeTec and Mud Bay Drilling to “foster responsible development of their land's resources.”
One of the conference’s gold sponsors is the Pathways Alliance, a coalition of the six biggest tar sands producers and polluters, which is attempting to secure billions of dollars in government subsidies for a labyrinthine pipeline network to transfer sequestered carbon dioxide to a storage facility in Cold Lake, Alta., so they can continue business as usual.
Chief Kelsey Jacko of Cold Lake First Nations, on whose land the storage hub is planned, told me in September that he’s been unable to get any clear answers from the alliance about the project, which he added is getting “rubber stamped.”
Pathways, by the way, responded to impending federal anti-greenwashing regulations, which update the Competition Act to require companies to provide evidence for environmental claims in advertising, by scrubbing their entire website.
“I really hope that those people up there understand that they can no longer continue to make profits off the backs of our communities and off of our communities’ heartache and losses,” Indigenous Climate Action executive director Eriel Tchekwie Deranger said at the protest event.
According to a 2022 report from Environmental Defence Canada, the space occupied by tar sands tailings grew from 1.5 square kilometres in 1975 to 120 square kilometres in 2020—an 7,833% increase over the course of 45 years.
And those fluids, which accumulate in pools colloquially known as ponds, don’t just sit there.
In February 2023, Mikisew Cree First Nation and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) learned that tailings from Imperial Oil’s Kearl mine had been seeping into the Athabasca River, only after 5.3 million tonnes of contaminated wastewater escaped from a draining pond.
The Canadian Press reported that the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) had known about the seepage as early as 2019.
Deranger, who is an ACFN member, suggested that the Kearl seepages brought to light what Indigenous communities downstream from the tar sands have had to deal with for decades.
“We're talking about 65 years of oil and gas development that has created hundreds of kilometres of toxic tailings that have been leaching into our groundwater and aquifer systems for over 65 years,” said Deranger.
The technological solutions offered at the conference are simply not realistic, she added.
Deranger noted that in 2011, she visited the headquarters of the French energy company Total, where company representatives did a “fancy demonstration” of their plans for dry tar sands tailings.
That technological fix “never came to light,” she said, and by October 2023, the company sold all its tar sands assets.
But while Total could wash its hands of the tar sands, the people who live downstream from them have no such luxury, and must deal with the consequences of continued tailings growth.
“What this has resulted in in my community, downstream in Fort Chipewyan, is that our entire lake bed is contaminated,” Deranger said.
A 2017 risk assessment report from Transport Canada found that the water, sediments and shore of the dock in Fort Chip, a key transport hub for the remote community, are contaminated with various carcinogenic chemicals—findings which were concealed from ACFN until this year.
Additionally, a 1997 report found the presence of gamma radiation at the dock site, a possibility which went unexamined in the risk assessment 20 years later.
Paul Belanger, a scientific advisor to Keepers of the Water, said the tech-based solutions industry is proposing to minimize the impact of tailings obscures that “their extraction process seems to be the source of the problem.”
The process of extracting tar sands bitumen requires the use of the chemical lye, which is commonly used to make soap, to separate bitumen from the rest of the slurry mixture that represents the tar in tar sands.
The bitumen gets sent to refineries to be made into usable products while the slurry is left behind to contaminate Indigenous communities’ water.
“It seems as though a monster is being created and there’s a huge quandary,” Belanger said, noting that this is a “very dirty process that produces very, very dirty tailings.”
“The industry is avoiding dealing with it, kicking the can down the road one year after the other, one decade after the other,” he added.
But a lack of transparency from the AER is also part of the problem.
“We don't know to what extent which ponds are leaching into groundwater,” said Belanger.
“The regulator seems to hide information. We always have to spend a lot of money to get secret data, even if it's available.”
In addition to polluting the water, oil extraction uses a lot of it. According to the AER, from 2013 to 2022, industry used an average of 2.47 barrels of water per barrel of oil, but Belanger said he suspects the true figure is much higher.
“My feeling is these numbers are just creative numbers, not real numbers,” he said. “I think it's important to state that whatever industry is claiming is not a fact. We don't have facts. We don't have evidence to prove that that's all they're using now.”
Cleo Desjarlais Reece, a Keepers of the Water board member and Treaty 8 Elder, said she’s been aware of the tar sands’ downstream health impacts since 2008, when she met Dr. John O’Connor on a tour of the Athabasca Watershed.
Two years earlier, Dr. O’Connor had raised concerns about disproportionately high cancer rates in Fort Chip.
“We had no way of knowing the long term effects, but already in 2008 there was this alarm. Now here we are, 2024 and we're still talking about it, and my concern is with accountability,” said Reece, who is from Fort McMurray First Nation, but emphasized she wasn’t speaking on the band’s behalf.
In 2009, the Alberta Cancer Board confirmed that occurrences of biliary tract, blood and lymphatic system and soft tissue cancers were 30% higher in Fort Chip than in the rest of the province.
A 2014 report from Alberta’s then-chief medical officer of health Dr. James Talbot found higher than expected occurrences of cervical, lung and bile duct cancers in Fort Chip, but didn’t examine the possibility they were caused by industrial pollution.
In August, the federal government committed $12 million for a 10-year study on the tar sands’ health impacts in Fort Chip.
“Who is going to be accountable for the kind of pollution, for the long-term environmental degradation, for the destruction of our watersheds, [for the] destruction of our forests?” said Reece.
“And where is the money going to come from to clean up the mess?”
UAlberta academic Adkin, who specializes in political ecology, spoke to the fossil fuel industry’s influence on post-secondary scholarship, referring to Alberta’s universities as “petro-universities.”
She noted that extensive research has been conducted into how to address the issue of tailings by bodies such as UAlberta’s Oil Sands Tailings Research Facility and Institute for Oil Sands Innovation, the industry-backed Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), the federal government’s Natural Science Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and provincial government’s Alberta Innovates.
Yet none have found a durable solution. Adkin said this is because the research is directed by forces “that are committed to prolonging the extraction of fossil fuels for as long as possible, which requires keeping the operations profitable.”
“In a nutshell, the problem, as we see from every area of regulation, is the long history of industry demands for government subsidies. The oilsands corporations want to minimize and postpone any environmental expenditure,” she added.
In 2021, for instance, the federal Ministry of Environment and Climate Change announced it was developing plans to permit the release of partially treated tailings fluid into the Athabasca River upon recommendations from NSERC and COSIA.
Starved of public funds, research bodies are forced to increasingly depend upon funding from private actors who have a clear financial stake in the outcome of their research, said Adkin.
“The research funding model is part of the problem. The corporate dominance of the innovation agenda and clean energy initiatives is part of the problem. The failure of university researchers to challenge this dominance of the funding model is part of the problem,” she said.
“We need scientists and engineers and, in fact, all academics to fight for a research agenda that serves decolonization, recognizes the need to phase out fossil fuels and reduce energy demand in the most socially equitable ways possible, and values interdisciplinary and Indigenous knowledge.”
"A cursory glance at the event’s sponsors reveals that the tailing conference was analogous to arsonists hosting a forum on fire safety." CLASSIC Appel!