Living downstream from one of the world’s largest industrial projects isn’t easy — especially when things go wrong. When the community of Fort Chipewyan in Alberta, Canada, learned there had been a major spill of toxic wastewater from Imperial Oil’s Kearl tar sands site, it was chaos, says Melaine Dene, acting director of the Mikisew Cree First Nation’s department of government and industry relations.

The remote community of nearly 800 mostly Indigenous people, better known simply as Fort Chip, sits on the southwest shore of Lake Athabasca, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) downriver from the oil sands, a sprawling industrial complex of open-pit mines, smokestacks and tailings ponds in the boreal forest.

In January 2023, 5.3 million liters (1.4 million gallons) of toxic water filled with mining waste, or tailings, overflowed from one of the drainage ditches at the Imperial facility.

But the public didn’t learn of the spill until days later, when the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), the provincial agency that oversees energy development, posted an environmental protection order (EPO) on its website. And the EPO came with another shocking surprise: a second drainage ditch had been seeping toxic wastewater into groundwater for at least nine months.

Neither AER nor Imperial Oil directly notified Indigenous leadership about the spill or the ongoing leakage.

Fort Chipewyan draws its drinking water from Lake Athabasca, and when news broke, people feared the waterbody was contaminated, Dene says. Her first priority was to make sure the community had safe drinking water. In winter, the only access to Fort Chipewyan is by ice road, so she scrambled to get bottled water in before the road melted.

But people were worried about more than their drinking water. The mostly Indigenous communities along the Athabasca River — including people in Fort Chipewyan, Fort McKay and into the Northwest Territories — hunt, fish and gather traditional foods from the land and waters.

“We still utilize our land, we still utilize our water, we still continue to harvest fish … And … to feel those types of impacts, especially an impact like [the Kearl spill and ongoing seepage], that really impacts who we are as First Nations people, impacts our relationality with our land and our water,” Dene says.

Fear of the unseen and government distrust

At a federal parliamentary hearing two months after the spill announcement, Allan Adam, chief of the Athabasca-Chipewyan First Nation, described the heavy sense of responsibility he felt when he first learned of the disaster.

“After being notified about the spill … I went back home to Fort Chip. I had to turn that tap on to cook my food. I drink two cups of coffee every morning. Where does that water come from? Knowing that turning that tap on could be detrimental to my health … I felt so alone. I did not know how to tell the people what was going on,” he said.

He added, “I try to give people a good life and the good responsibility of raising up their kids so that our life will continue on. Why do I have to come before the committee to defend our community again?”

Billy-Joe Tuccaro, chief of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, also spoke before the committee: “The spring runoff is the most vital time for our people. As we harvest fish, meat, vegetation and traditional medicine from the land, how can we get assurance that this is OK for our people to sustain their way of life? … Who can give me the certainty that when [our] kids go in the water [to swim] they’re going to be safe?”

The spill and ongoing seepage also reignited deeper concerns about tar sands’ impacts on health and the environment. Many people, both inside and outside Indigenous communities, say they’re frustrated with what they feel is a lack of government oversight.

This March, Adam and the Athabasca-Chipewyan First Nation sued the AER over negligence and consistently failing to act in a way that considers treaty rights going back more than a century, and their Indigenous way of life.

“The AER is supposed to do its job and notify the community of wrongdoings that have harmful effects on human health,” Adam told Mongabay, “and they failed.”

In response to questions, the AER wrote to Mongabay that its mandate is to ensure the safe, efficient and environmentally responsible development of energy resources, and said it does so under “some of the highest environmental standards” in the world. It declined to respond to further questions, citing active litigation.

Dene says the AER has always allowed industry to police itself — at the expense of environmental and human health.

“How [is the AER] ensuring that industry is upholding and abiding by those [regulations] that are in place? Because what happened at Kearl is a clear indication of regulatory failure,” she says.

Change comes to the tar sands of northern Alberta

Northern Alberta is a vast expanse of boreal forest, a land of spruce trees, muskeg, caribou and moose. The Athabasca River flows north from the Rocky Mountains, then meets the Peace River to form the largest freshwater delta in the world, before flowing through Canada’s Northwest Territories and emptying into the Arctic Ocean. Indigenous peoples have lived off these lands for millennia.

Alice Rigney, now an elder from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, was raised on the shores of the Athabasca River, in a small hamlet called Jackfish. It was an ideal spot for fishing, hunting and trapping, she says.

But in the late 1960s, her family began noticing changes on the land and water, Rigney says. When the Peace River was dammed in 1968, water levels across the delta dropped. And then the first oil company arrived and started digging. At the time, it was hard to imagine the impact that would have.

“I remember stopping at what is [the] Suncor [mine] now. I must have been about 13, [and] they were just cutting down these big giant white spruce along the river,” Rigney recalls. “Did I think it would be what it is today? I didn’t.”

Though production of the tar sands began in the late 1960s, oil development didn’t take off until the 2000s, when new technologies and soaring oil demand made exploitation financially feasible. By 2022, crude bitumen production from the oil sands was 3.3 million barrels daily, netting C$16.9 billion ($13 billion at the time) in royalties for Alberta, according to government figures.

‘Extreme extraction’

Jesse Cardinal, executive director of Keepers of the Water, an Indigenous-led nonprofit, calls what’s happening in the tar sands “extreme extraction.”

Canada’s tar sands are the fourth-largest oil deposit in the world, covering 142,000 square kilometers (55,000 square miles) of boreal forest — an area twice the size of Ireland. The oil is in the form of bitumen, a heavy, sticky type of petroleum, and is tightly bound up with the underlying earth.

Deeper deposits, at depths of more than 75 meters (250 feet), are mined “in situ,” by pumping steam underground to liquify the bitumen. Shallower deposits, mostly found near the Athabasca River, are extracted using immense strip mines. As of 2020, companies have stripped more than 1,000 km² (about 400 mi²) of land. This strip-mining process also produces large volumes of industrial wastewater — a slurry of water, sand, clay, residual bitumen and toxic compounds — all stored in earth-lined pits called tailings ponds.

The expectation is that dense tailings pond sediments will settle out, and that due to the prevailing geology, the ponds are largely sufficient for containing the toxic tailings liquid. Any seepage is meant to be captured by a drainage interception system, and pumped back into the main tailings pond.

But at Kearl, that interception system failed. In May 2022, an Imperial Oil employee noticed rust-colored water on the ground. The company informed the AER, and after determining that seepage from a drainage ditch was mixing with shallow groundwater, the company began installing new interception wells to fix the problem, albeit with limited success.

Then, on Feb. 4, 2023, Imperial Oil employees discovered a drainage pond had overflowed, spilling more than two Olympic-sized swimming pools of industrial wastewater onto land adjacent to the Firebag and Muskeg rivers, which feed into the Athabasca River.

Later, an Imperial Oil report noted that instrument problems and process failure were to blame for the incidents. But the ongoing seepage has still not been fully resolved.

In an emailed response, Imperial Oil said the spill has been cleaned up, with regular updates about the seepage published on its website. Imperial also noted it “continue[s] to support site tours and independent water testing by all communities.” The June 2024 website update notes that “mitigations are working as intended and preventing further off-site migration of impacted water” from the seepage.

Both Imperial Oil and the AER maintain that extensive water testing shows that, to date, there’s no indication of adverse impacts to drinking water, fish or wildlife, though contaminants were detected in waterbodies near the site. (First Nations and others are also monitoring water quality).

But Mandy Olsgard, an environmental toxicologist who consults for First Nations in the area, says it’s “mind-boggling” that they claim there’s no evidence of any impact. She says extensive monitoring only went in after the recent incidents and other developments had compromised the area.

“There was no impact by default because there’s no [past] data to tell us anything. So now that they have all this monitoring in that area … it’s likely a previously impacted area,” Olsgard says.

A federal government inquiry into the incidents is ongoing. A third-party report commissioned by the AER into the agency’s handling of communications, released in September 2023, found that the agency correctly followed procedures (though it noted those procedures were outdated).

But many feel these latest incidents are symptoms of larger issues with industry regulation, and point the finger at the AER.

“The regulator gives really full autonomy to industry to monitor, report on that monitoring and self-determine the action. They don’t direct actions to manage or mitigate the risks,” Olsgard says. “I really think it’s regulatory reform that’s required.”

Toxic tailings an ongoing risk

There’s currently no approved method for reclaiming tar sands wastewater. As a result, tailings ponds now cover 270 km² (104 mi²) and hold 1.4 trillion liters (370 billion gallons) of industrial wastewater — equivalent to more than 560,000 Olympic swimming pools full of toxic liquids.

These toxic compounds include heavy metals like arsenic and lead, which bioaccumulate up the food chain and have numerous serious human health impacts on the brain, kidneys, liver and other organs; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), many of which are probable human carcinogens; naphthenic acids, which have demonstrated impacts on reproductive health in fish and amphibians; and more.

As many of these compounds come from the bitumen itself, they’re already found in the wider environment at low background levels, due to natural erosion. That’s made teasing out the impact of the tar sands mining complicated.

However, there’s mounting scientific evidence that levels of a number of compounds are higher downstream of the tar sands developments. For example, a 2020 report by the Council for Environmental Cooperation, a body organized under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), found “scientifically valid evidence” that contaminants from wastewater (tailings) are entering groundwater, though noted that there was less scientific evidence that it was entering surface waters.

And tailings aren’t the only sources of water pollution; toxic air pollution from the tar sands also enters waterways when the contaminants settle on the ground, or land in waterbodies, or are deposited in snow.

While exposure to high concentrations of pollutants can cause outright mortality, low chronic levels of pollution can have more subtle impacts, says Chris Elvidge, a postdoctoral researcher at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Elvidge’s research shows that wood frogs (Lithobates sylvaticus) exposed to low doses of naphthenic acids had difficulty mating, and the offspring they produced were more likely to be deformed. Studies on other aquatic species had similar findings.

Those types of low concentrations of naphthenic acids are already found in water downstream of the tar sands, Elvidge says. Incidents like the Kearl spill add to that burden.

“To say that there aren’t negative consequences is foolish, right? In terms of, ‘Everything’s fine here, everyone look away, there’s nothing to see.’ That’s clearly not the case,” Elvidge says.

‘The anxiety is palpable’

Communities near the tar sands have long voiced concerns about the impacts of pollution on their health.

An investigation by the Alberta Cancer Board in 2009 found cancer rates in the Fort Chipewyan community were higher than expected. However, they noted that as the sample size was very small, the elevated rates could be due to chance or increased detection. Still, they wrote that the possibility of an increased risk “couldn’t be ruled out,” and recommended further study and monitoring. But no long-term study has been done to date.

John O’Connor, who was a family physician in Fort Chipewyan from 2003 to 2007 and maintains strong ties to the community, says residents feel their health concerns have not been taken seriously enough. They’ve been told repeatedly that it’s challenging to draw statistically robust conclusions in a small community, and that “sort of stuck in the craw of many people in Fort Chip,” he says.

“Their sort of conclusion is, ‘Do we matter? Do we exist in the minds of people that are saying this?’” he says. “The anxiety is palpable.”

A problem that isn’t going away

What’s clear is that pollution concerns aren’t going away. The tailing ponds keep growing — and there’s no viable plan for what happens next.

“As a scientist working in this area and understanding the technical limitations, I believe we have a high degree of risk around closure,” says Heather Kaminsky, a research scientist at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT).

Alberta government regulations state that tar sands mine sites must be fully reclaimed within 10 years of closure; in other words, they must be turned into viable ecosystems. For many years, expectations were that tailing ponds would become what’s called end pit lakes, a reclamation technology commonly used at other Canadian mine sites, Kaminsky says. This involves letting heavier toxic elements settle, then capping the ponds with freshwater.

The AER is scheduled to decide on approval of this technology next year. But at a reclamation demonstration site run by Syncrude Canada, things haven’t gone as planned. Kaminsky says the demonstration site’s 2022 report showed that after 10 years, Syncrude hadn’t met even its short-term targets for several parameters.

“I will go out on the scary limb here and say if I were the regulator, I [would] have serious concerns about approving end pit lake technology, as it currently stands in the two iterations that exist,” she says.

The problem, Kaminsky adds, is that she doesn’t know of another viable restoration option that’s been tested at scale.

In 2021, the Canadian government began putting together regulations that would allow oil sands operators to release treated tailings into the environment, something the industry points out other mining sites are already allowed to do.

But that proposal has been deeply contentious, with fierce opposition from several First Nations and the government of the Northwest Territories, which lie downstream of the tar sands. The lack of transparency over the Kearl incident hasn’t helped matters

Many worry that the health and environmental impacts of the tar sands is being pushed to the side. There’s also rising concern that eventual cleanup is slipping out of reach.

“Of course, industry has a lot of power because you look at the royalties that both levels of government are receiving off of the oil sands production and it’s a lot,” Dene says. “And here you have a little handful of people that aren’t offering anything other than just requesting the right to health and the right to clean drinking water.

“But … we don’t have royalties to be handing over — even though this is stolen land,” she adds with a wry smile, “So they’re already kind of receiving those royalties on our behalf.”

Banner image: Bitumen from the tar sands in northern Alberta, Canada. Bitumen is a heavy sticky form of oil with the consistency of peanut butter. Extracting and separating the bitumen from the sands and clay requires large amounts of water and energy, making Alberta’s oil sands one of the most carbon and water intensive forms of oil on Earth. Image by Francis Black via iStock.

Canada oil sands air pollution 20-64 times worse than industry says: Study

Citations:

Lévesque, L. M., Roy, J., Glozier, N. E., Dirk, L., & Cooke, C. A. (2023). Dissolved polycyclic aromatic compounds in Canada’s Athabasca River in relation to oil sands from 2013 through 2019. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 195(11), 1354. doi:10.1007/s10661-023-11846-x

Li, C., Fu, L., Stafford, J., Belosevic, M., & El-Din, M. G. (2017). The toxicity of oil sands process-affected water (OSPW): A critical review. Science of The Total Environment, 601-602, 1785-1802. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.06.024

Kavanagh, R. J., Frank, R. A., Burnison, B. K., Young, R. F., Fedorak, P. M., Solomon, K. R., & Van Der Kraak, G. (2012). Fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) reproduction is impaired when exposed to a naphthenic acid extract. Aquatic Toxicology, 116-117, 34-42. doi:10.1016/j.aquatox.2012.03.002

Kelly, E. N., Short, J. W., Schindler, D. W., Hodson, P. V., Ma, M., Kwan, A. K., & Fortin, B. L. (2009). Oil sands development contributes polycyclic aromatic compounds to the Athabasca River and its tributaries. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(52), 22346-22351. doi:10.1073/pnas.0912050106

Robinson, C. E., Elvidge, C. K., Frank, R. A., Headley, J. V., Hewitt, L. M., Little, A. G., … Orihel, D. M. (2023). Naphthenic acid fraction compounds reduce the reproductive success of wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) by affecting offspring viability. Environmental Pollution, 316, 120455. doi:10.1016/j.envpol.2022.120455

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