When Syncrude shows out-of-towners its oilsands operations north of Fort McMurray, the company ends each tour with a stop at Gateway Hill, a relatively young forest on the east side of Highway 63. It used to be a wetland back in the 1970s, before the company started mining nearby for oilsands.

Today, the company uses the tree-covered area as a visible example of the oil industry’s environmental stewardship. Syncrude calls it a “reclaimed” site—and, in a first for the oilsands industry, the Alberta government certified it as such on March 19, ending a lengthy application process. By certifying the 104-hectare site, the Alberta government has robbed oilsands critics of one of their most common criticisms: “No oilsands land has ever been certified as reclaimed.” Now it has.

There’s little visible trace of industrial activity from years past on Gateway Hill. “When you dig the earth above the oilsands, you have to put that non-oilsands material to the side,” says Syncrude spokesperson Alain Moore. “This hill—Gateway Hill—represents that material that we put on the side as we began our initial mining operation in the 1970s.” 

However, the site is completely different from what it was in 1970. “It’s gone from a lower-lying wetland landscape to an upland landscape that’s not at all representative of what was lost,” says Pembina Institute policy analyst Jennifer Grant. The site now has hiking trails, biking trails, and interpretive signs—as well as some wetlands, albeit “less than what there was before,” according to Moore.

Alberta Environment’s stated goal of reclamation is to restore disturbed land to “equivalent land capability,” but Grant says that’s a “subjective and somewhat vague” goal. “A lot of people might think it is restoration, [that] what is lost will be restored,” she says, “but it’s very different.” 

Kim Capstick, communications director for Alberta Environment, says the land needs to go back to “being useful” for it to be certified as reclaimed—but that doesn’t mean wetlands will necessarily be replaced with wetlands. “We can’t say that because, for instance, there were five trees on this plot of land, there needs to be specifically five trees put back,” Capstick says. “We’re going to look at it from a much broader perspective than that. So in this case, what had been wetland is now upland.... It’s different for each area.”

When a company transforms wetland into upland like Syncrude did at Gateway Hill, there are many ecological implications. “With the loss of wetlands, you’re losing a host of ecosystem services,” says Grant. Wetlands—shallow ponds, fens, muskeg, and marshes—help purify water, control soil erosion, provide flood control, moderate climate change, and provide habitat to birds and fish. About half the oilsands region is covered by wetlands. 

Liberal environment critic David Swann says “lax” reclamation regulations cast doubt on the province’s efforts to conserve and restore Alberta’s shrinking wetlands. “If we’re serious about that commitment, then we have to make sure that every square kilometre of wetland that’s being lost to the oilsands has to be replaced in some way,” he says. “I don’t see that yet.”

Grant acknowledges Syncrude’s reclamation certification is “significant to a certain degree,” but she lists off several other problems. For one, it’s taken more than 40 years for a relatively small site to be certified—and the speed of development is far outpacing the speed of reclamation. “That’s 104 hectares out of 42,000 hectares of disturbed land,” says Grant. “We have a long, long way to go to catch up to development.” She suggests tying development to reclamation so damage could be minimized, so that “with every 100 hectares of disturbed land, there would be another 100 hectares of land that is certified as reclaimed.”

Syncrude says it has reclaimed about 4,500 hectares of land. However, the Gateway Hill site is the only one that’s been certified. “Basically, when we plant vegetation... is when we then categorize it as reclaimed land,” says Moore, adding the company is “currently assessing” other reclaimed areas to submit for certification.

The Gateway Hill site also doesn’t represent the major environmental challenge facing the industry: lakes filled with tailings, or toxic sludge. “That is where the most serious, most significant challenges lie for reclamation in the oilsands,” Grant says. “We’re a long way off from solving these problems.”