EDMONTON — The death of 1,600 ducks in a Syncrude Canada tailings pond may have made a big splash with the public but it caused barely a ripple in the industry.
Syncrude has faced a highly publicized trial on federal and provincial wildlife charges and a judge is to deliver a verdict today.
But industry, government and environmental spokespeople all agree that while images of mallards struggling in sludgy water may have migrated around the world, industry practices and priorities really haven’t changed that much.
“Industry has been working on (tailings) technology for a long time,” Travis Davies from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said Thursday.
“The public expects continual improvement.”
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent over the last few years on making tailings ponds less toxic.
Suncor alone plans to spend another billion dollars over the next few years to reduce the contaminated waste water that flows from its operations.
That money would have been spent regardless of whether the doomed flock made its fatal landing in 2008, Davies said.
“Increased public expectations around (environmental) performance, generally and specifically on tailings, have motivated industry to invest vast human and capital resources on addressing the tough issue of tailings reduction.”
The province’s environmental regulator had been working on regulations that put deadlines on tailings ponds reclamation long before the ducks died, said Bob Curran at the Energy Resources Conservation Board.
“That was irrelevant,” he said. “We were going to do this anyway.”
David Keith, professor of energy and the environment at the University of Calgary, shrugs at any suggestion that the ducks trial has influenced the industry.
“I don’t think it’s very important,” he said.
Mike Hudema at Greenpeace hasn’t seen much change either — although his take is somewhat different.
He points out that some oilsands companies have already been granted extensions to their cleanup “deadlines.” As well, Alberta is considering licensing a whole new tailings pond operation at Total’s proposed Jocelyn mine in northern Alberta.
On Thursday, his group produced data suggesting that Alberta Environment’s budget for monitoring, compliance, enforcement and standards — including for the oilsands — has shrunk nearly every year since 2003.
“It is, unfortunately, business as usual,” he said.
What may have changed — especially in the light of similar distressing wildlife images from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico — is public awareness of the lengths to which industry is going to meet society’s need for energy.
“There’s growing awareness that oilsands development and deep offshore drilling are both symptoms of the same thing,” said Simon Dyer of the Pembina Institute, an environmental think-tank. “Given that we’re running out of easily accessible conventional oil, we’re either having to incur significant risks or significant environmental impact in order to continue to produce oil.”
Images from northern Alberta and the Gulf of Mexico may be connecting the dots for people, said Andrew Leach, a professor of energy and the environment at the University of Alberta.
“Both of them illustrate that there isn’t any more easy oil,” he said. “There’s no more unobtrusive oil that comes out of the land with easily contained risks. People have come to understand that.”