New report debunks Alberta Energy Regulator's tailings spills data
Regulator's data lacks crucial evidence of environmental harm, with spill volumes and footprints vastly understated, ecologist Kevin Timoney finds.
A new academic study examining 514 bitumen tailings spills in Alberta over a decade has found that the provincial regulator’s records “lack the ecological, biological, and chemical data required to assess and manage the environmental impacts of tailings spills.”
The report, published by ecologist Kevin Timoney in the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment journal on Jan. 3, challenges the Alberta Energy Regulator’s (AER) claim that tailings spills haven’t caused any environmental damage.
In an interview with the Orchard, Timoney called this claim a “red flag, because that's not physically possible in the real world.”
Tailings are the toxic sludge that emanates from the tar sands extraction process, which are stored in pools often referred to as ponds.
Spills can have major health impacts on water quality, wildlife, the environment and public health, underscoring the importance of the public having access to clear and reliable data about them.
For the paper, Timoney examined the AER’s publicly available Field Inspection System (FIS) database for each tailings spill that occurred from January 2014 to May 2023, and filed freedom of information requests for all documents relating to those incidents that were in the AER’s possession, including photos of the spill sites, which the article describes as the sole piece “objective data” contained in the documents.
By comparing the documents he received with the publicly reported data, he was able to assess the “reliability and credibility of the data,” Timoney explained.
In 99% of the spills examined, the AER claimed publicly that the spill footprint was less than 100 square metres, which Timoney said is “not physically possible, given the … known relationship between spill volume and spill footprints.”
“It's like you're stating that you spilled a gallon of milk onto the head of a pin,” he explained.
The study outlines how the AER has vastly underreported volumes and footprints of tailings spills. In one instance, the FIS publicly reported a spill of 44,596 m3. But the documents Timoney obtained showed that the AER knew its true volume was 4,459,680 m3—100 times larger.
Timoney found that the AER had conducted routine inspections on just 3.2% of the tailings spills, calling into question how the AER can make sweeping claims about a lack of environmental impact.
In another incident, the FIS publicly reported a spill volume of 500 m3, which was later increased tenfold to 5,000 m3. While the AER claimed there was “no environmental impact,” the regulator never conducted an inspection.
The FIS reported the spill’s footprint as less than 100 m2, whereas the documents Timoney obtained reported it as 465 m2, which he said based on the photograph evidence is still an understatement.
“Images show spilled bitumen, soil contamination in a large footprint, and contact with vegetation. Both the spill volume and spill impact were visual estimates,” Timoney writes in the study.
The article notes how the AER routinely makes basic reporting errors on spill dates and locations, which calls its research methods into further question.
In addition to establishing that the AER’s data collection methods aren’t credible, the study aims to establish a “plausible rate of harm.”
Important data, such as the spills’ chemical impact on water, wildlife, vegetation and soil, were absent from the documents, so Timoney was forced to gauge these factors based on photos alone.
Based on the photographic evidence, Timoney concluded that somewhere in the range of 41% to 54% of the photographed spills had evidence of environmental damage.
But only a quarter of the spills had photographs taken. Extrapolating the rate of environmental damage from the cases with photos, Timoney calculated that anywhere from 23% to 36% of tailings spills caused environmental harm.
In most of the cases where there was no visible environmental damage from the tailings spills, Timoney explained, it was because the spills occurred in “areas that have been so heavily impacted already that you can't really detect an effect … because it's already been completely devastated.”
“In those cases, I gave the AER the benefit of the doubt and said, ‘I can't detect an effect here based on the photography, because the area is already devoid of life.’ It's an unliving substrate that has been so heavily disturbed by humans that there is no effect,” he explained.
The study argues that the AER’s inability to provide credible information isn’t accidental. Rather, it reflects the reality of a captured regulator, whose primary aim is to provide justification for the industry that it’s tasked with holding to account.
AER spokesperson Renato Gandia told the Orchard that the regulator has received Timoney’s report and its “subject matter experts will review the data for a more comprehensive response at a later time.”
“In regard to tailings spills generally, once a release occurs, companies must report the incident and complete a release report to record the release type, volume released and recovered, location, any adverse effects on the environment, and other information,” Gandia wrote.
He added that the regulator “routinely conducts inspections to ensure that releases have been cleaned up and remediated in accordance with the regulations [and] to assess potential adverse impacts to the environment and wildlife.”
You can read Timoney’s paper in full below.
In these days of drone technology how expensive or difficult would it be to do drone surveillance of spill sites or leaking wells with detectors for methane or other gases?
Lack of will or AEG's corporate leash most likely.