The death of roughly 500 ducks in a Syncrude tailings pond last week has caused a firestorm of controversy and media attention, prompting Syncrude to apologize publicly and Stephen Harper to declare the incident a “terrible tragedy.”

But this flap is just the tip of the beak in terms of the dangerous consequences of the oilsands, says Pembina Institute senior analyst Simon Dyer. The Alberta government has continually downplayed those consequences.

That the duck deaths occurred during deputy premier Ron Stevens’ oilsands promotion trip to Washington illustrates Dyer’s point. The $25 million branding campaign was designed to sell Alberta oil to the rest of the world, and the duck incident puts the government’s claims in harsh relief.

With the help of the Pembina Institute, Environmental Defence, and the Boreal Songbird Initiative, SEE Magazine examined the accuracy of some of the claims contained in Government of Alberta’s public relations campaign literature: Alberta’s Oil Sands. Opportunity. Balance. And we discovered a coating of waffle-words, misleading statements, and unsupported environmental optimism that’s as thick and toxic as the sediment of a tailings pond (that’s a lake of toxic waste to you and me).

“Tailings are a mixture of clay, sand, water and fine silts formed during the oil sands extraction process. They are contained in ponds or settling basins, which are effective ways of managing them while they settle.”

• That description doesn’t include polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a carcinogen, or naphthenic acids, a toxin.

• It could take up to 100 years for tailings to naturally settle.

• Current tailings ponds waste water is equal to 220,000 Olympic swimming pools, according to Pembina. By 2020, the oilsands will create enough tailings ponds to fill 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools—that’s a surface area five times that of Sylvan Lake.

• The recovery plan for the tailings includes piping the toxic sludge into the deep mining pits after all the oil has been extracted and topping it off with freshwater. (The resulting bodies of water are called end pit lakes.)

• End pit lakes have never been proven to be an effective recovery strategy.

• Birds of all kinds have died in the tailings ponds, a development that’s been going on for decades, according to Dr. Jeff Wells, a scientist with the Boreal Songbird Initiative.

• Wells points to weekly surveys of the tailings ponds done in the late 1970s by a University of Alberta masters student who observed that tailings ponds killed at least 100 to 300 birds every year. The study only counted the dead birds that were visible, so the results were likely on the low side, Wells says.

• According to Environmental Defence’s report Canada’s Toxic Tar Sands: The Most Destructive Project On Earth, the dams holding the tailings fail, on average, once per year. In the last six years, that frequency has risen to two per year.

“Stringent legislation and on-the-ground measures are already in place to protect the air, land and water during oil sands development. And government is continuously making improvements to balance the protection of the environment and the development of this valuable resource.”

• Kevin Timoney, the doctor who raised the alarm about cancers in the Fort Chipewyan, called the lack of data on oil spills from the oilsands operations “institutional amnesia.” In his now-famous report, he openly questioned the government’s own studies and monitoring practices.

• Timoney points to funding cuts for water monitoring that started in the 1980s.

• Dr. John O’Connor points to the sharp rise in health problems in Fort Chipewyan: skin rashes, lupus, lymphomas, colon cancers, thyroid cancers, leukemia, and bile duct cancers.

• According to Environmental Defence’s report, sediment in the Athabasca contains double the concentration of PAHs that cause cancer in fish.

“New technologies continue to reduce the footprint of oilsands development. For example, carbon dioxide emissions have gone down by 45 per cent per barrel of oil since 1990, and up to 90 per cent of water can be recycled, depending on the maturity of the facility and type of extraction. The gap is closing.”

• Well, that’s partly true, says Dyer. “On a per-barrel basis, oil companies have reduced pollution and the amount of water used, but those gains are outstripped by the growing amount of bitumen extraction. The gap is not closing. The impacts on the environment are increasing.”

“By law, industry must post financial security equivalent to the cost of reclamation before beginning oil sands activity.”

• Alberta Environment’s 2006-2007 annual report says there is $468 million in securities for reclamation. (Securities are money from industry that is supposed to ensure that enough money has been put aside to clean up the land.) 

• $468 million breaks down to about $11,000 per hectare of disturbed land, which Dyer says will not be enough to reclaim even relatively clean land such as that recently reclaimed by Syncrude at Gateway Hill.

• Syncrude told the media after their Gateway Hill announcement that in 2006 they spent $30.5 million on 267 hectares of land, or about $114,000 per hectare.

“Alberta’s boreal forest covers an area of 381,000 square kilometres (147,100 square miles). The entire mineable area in the oilsands covers 3,500 square kilometres (1,350 square miles), which is less than one per cent of boreal forest area.”

• These numbers only talk about mines, and not in situ projects, which Dyer says could have an even bigger impact than the mining.

• According to Pembina, most of the boreal forest in Alberta has already been leased to the forestry and gas industry.

• The boreal forest is considered a major buffer to climate change.

“There are 420 square kilometres (162 square miles) of land that has been disturbed by oil sands activity—which is just over half the area of the City of Edmonton, or one-third the area of the

City of Los Angeles.”

• If you factor in the planned oilsands projects, that number jumps significantly. According to Pembina, planned and existing oilsands projects will directly impact more than 2,000 square kilometres of boreal forest, which is equal to 28,465 NFL football fields, or three times the size of Edmonton, or about the size of Tokyo.

“Carbon capture and storage is a practical way for Alberta to address climate change.”

• No currently planned oilsands operation will use carbon capture, says Dyer, who adds that talking about something that is a future possibility as if it were already happening is misleading.