The great pools of industrial wastewater from oilsands operations in Northern Alberta—commonly called tailings ponds—are some of the biggest human-made structures in the world. 

How big? Big enough to be visible from space.

Tailings ponds are filled with the process water used to remove the bitumen from the sand, and are a toxic slurry of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, naphthenic acids, salt, sand, silt, and clay.

Last week, the provincial government announced a $3 million grant to the University of Alberta’s School of Energy and the Environment for research into reclaiming tailings ponds. But that money is minuscule compared to the environmental challenge facing Albertans, says Simon Dyer, a senior policy analyst with environmental think tank The Pembina Institute. 

While industry is nominally responsible for reclaiming the land, Dyer says, there is no accountability mechanism and no viable reclamation plan. “The Alberta government realizes it has a serious image problem concerning the oilsands,” he continues, “so I think we are seeing a sprinkling of these announcements framed as environmental management rather than what they are: research.” 

Pembina supports the U of A’s environmental research, especially since much of the previous research on tailings ponds has been done by industry, but Dyer is wary that this money is just another stalling tactic designed to look good but change nothing.

Current industry plans for reclaiming the tailings ponds include piping the toxic sludge into the deep mining pits after all the oil has been extracted and topping it off with fresh water. (The resulting bodies of water are called end pit lakes.) But those plans represent only hypothetical solutions to Alberta’s environmental problems, according to Dyer. “That’s never been demonstrated,” he says. “You can imagine: there are real risks if we ever saw a mixing of those waters.”

Brett Purdy, a reclamation research specialist with Alberta Environment, says that the oil companies are still responsible for environmental cleanup, even if the technology doesn’t work as expected. However, he believes the end pit lakes will work. The industrial sludge shouldn’t mix with the fresh water, Purdy says, because it is very dense and contains a lot of dissolved solids, having been used several times already to extract the oil from the sands. Over time, the water will clean itself.

Joseph Doucet, director of the U of A School of Energy and the Environment, the organization receiving the $3 million grant, is reluctant to say definitively how the money will be used until after he receives applications for the grant money; but Purdy suggests, despite his endorsement of the end pit lakes, that the money could wind up funding further investigations into the viability of that reclamation technique. (Other research projects could include investigations into the way tailings ponds actually behave, as they are much slower at separating the sand and other solids from the water than originally expected.)

This $3 million sum is far from the province’s first investment into reclamation techniques. In 2006, the province gave the Cumulative Environment Management Association, a multi-stakeholder NGO that investigates the environmental impact of the oilsands, a separate $2 million to look into reclamation issues. The provincial government has also partnered with the federal government and industry on many other research projects, says Environment Alberta spokesperson Josh Stewart. Purdy adds this is an ongoing process, and the recent investment won’t be the last.

But the idea of granting approvals now and doing research later scares Dyer, who wants a stop to all new oilsands approvals until a proven method of reclaiming the tailings ponds is presented. “We had the Syncrude reclamation announcement a couple weeks ago,” he says. “But it’s actually completely unrepresentative of the challenge the industry is facing. That was just topsoil that was stripped away many decades ago. In the long term, companies have to incorporate tailings into the dry landscape, and it’s never been proven how to do that.”

He estimates that if all the currently proposed oilsands projects were developed, there would be enough tailings ponds to fill 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools—all without a reliable cleanup plan. And there’s very little that environmental groups or private citizens can do about the matter, as there is no simple way to sue the oil companies, says Jodie Hierlmeier, a staff lawyer with the Environmental Law Centre.

Negligence, one of the most common grounds for action in environmental law, can’t be used because the government failed to establish a deadline for cleaning up the mess the oil industry leaves behind. “There are no time periods tied to reclamation,” says Hierlmeier. “The companies can basically take as long as they want to reclaim it.”

Also, the area is public land with no communities nearby, which means there’s no one to claim the tailings ponds are an undue nuisance to them—another common legal lever for fighting environmental damage. 

And there’s a good chance Albertans will be stuck with the bill to clean up the mess. Dyer points to Alberta Environment’s 2006-2007 annual report, which says there is $458 million in securities for reclamation. (Securities are money from industry which are supposed to ensure that there is enough money to clean up the land.)  That $458 breaks down to about $11,000 per hectare of disturbed land, which Dyer argues is not enough to reclaim even relatively clean land like Gateway Hill. (SEE was unable to obtain numbers on the total amount spent on reclamation efforts by Suncor or Syncrude by press time, but Syncrude did tell 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.) 

Given the magnitude of the environmental damage caused by the oilsands and the weak legal provisions to ensure industry cleans up their mess, Dyer wants the provincial government to take more precautions before approving further development. And that will require a lot more action than a $3 million research grant.