As Alberta’s tarsands gulp down north-flowing water, the NWT is awash in worries.
By Darren Campbell and Aaron Spitzer
In a lecture-room in Fort Smith’s federal building, just a few hundred metres from where the broad Slave River pours into the NWT and turns furious at the Rapids of the Drowned, Jay Morrison seems caught off guard. The pony-tailed 58-year-old, a Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society trustee from the Ottawa Valley, just paddled into town that morning as part of a cross-country canoe expedition to Inuvik. He’d prepared an upbeat slideshow about river conservation, laced with talk of “water spirits” and the joys of running wilderness rivers. But his audience -- a dozen earnest, fleece-and-jeans-clad locals – seems determined to shift the agenda toward more immediate and disheartening concerns.
“It’s such a big worry, how they’re consuming the water upstream,” one resident says, to a chorus of agreement. Another complains: “The river has dropped so much. Last summer it was 10 feet below normal.” A third nods at Morrison and says, “Yeah, the way it’s being drained, next time you’ll have to come here by hiking.”
Morrison, looking slightly bewildered, probably didn’t expect such vitriol from a sleepy backwoods village like Fort Smith. But it’s an issue soaked with vitriol: the downstream impacts of Alberta’s tarsands, just 300 kilometres south of here. In its bid to wring petroleum from the earth, Canada’s biggest oilpatch diverts a vast amount of flow from the Slave’s headwaters. Everything from fish to shipping could be impacted. People in this NWT border town are incensed – and, as they make clear to Morrison, they’re not alone. As he continues downstream to the Mackenzie Delta, they tell him, he can expect to hear plenty more gripes about how Northerners are being left high and dry.
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It’s a humbling and rather frightening experience to dip a paddle in the Slave – to feel the river’s inexorable northward press, to gape at its house-high waves, and to squint across its muddy, forbidding expanse to the hazy far bank. At places near Fort Smith the Slave measures a kilometre from shore to shore, is over 30 metres deep, and, at normal levels, carries approximately one trillion pounds of liquid per day into the NWT. It is the highest-volume watercourse entering Canada’s North. Yet the Slave, while big, is not long. Downstream from Fort Smith, it’s just a few days’ paddle to Great Slave Lake. Upstream, it reaches barely 100 kilometres, toward the southern reaches of Wood Buffalo National Park. There, it sloshes into existence, drawing 80 percent of its flow from the Peace, which snakes northeast from British Columbia, and the other 20 percent from the Athabasca, which washes right through the tarsands.
It is the Athabasca that allows the tarsands to exist. Turning the bitumen of northern Alberta into crude oil requires a staggering amount of water – between two-and-a-half and four barrels for each barrel of synthetic crude. Each year for this purpose the tarsands are licenced to divert up to 359-million cubic metres of water, twice what’s consumed annually by the city of Calgary. Once the water is tainted with tar, very little can be permitted to re-enter the watershed; instead, it sits in sprawling tailings ponds, or is injected deep underground, or evaporates. With some estimates of tarsands production rising from the present one million barrels per day to four million by 2020, it appears more and more of the Athabasca could be drained before it ever reaches the North.
That has environmental groups worried. Dan Woynillowicz is a policy analyst with the Pembina Institute, a Calgary-based environmental watchdog group. Woynillowicz has done a lot of work on the impacts of tarsands development. In 2006, he co-authored a 170-page Pembina report called, “Troubled Waters, Troubling Trends,” that examined tarsands water use and how it could be reduced. He says in recent years water flows on the Athabasca and Peace Rivers in the winter – when water flows are naturally lower – have been way down, in the 85- to 100-cubic-metres-per-second range. “That’s relatively low compared to the summer when you’re looking at close to 1,000 cubic metres per second at least,” Woynillowicz says. “There is that natural seasonal fluctuation. The question is, when you are in that valley of low flows in the winter, how much can you push those flows down before you have significant consequences?”
It’s a question Northerners aren’t waiting around to have answered. Instead, they’re starting to raise objections. The Deninu Ku’e First Nation of Fort Resolution, NWT, located 120 kilometres northwest of Fort Smith where the Slave flows into Great Slave Lake, made the rare move last year of intervening in the regulatory review of Imperial Oil’s Kearl tarsands mining and bitumen-processing project. The DKFN was concerned that water quality assessments in Imperial’s project application wouldn’t capture the cumulative impacts from the development on the Athabasca and Slave. Still, the project was approved.
Then, in January, Dehcho First Nation grand chief Herb Norwegian, never shy about generating publicity for his organization, called for a moratorium on the tarsands during a press conference held at Suncor’s 260,000-barrel-per-day tarsands facilities near Fort McMurray. Norwegian had led a delegation of 11 chiefs and elders from the NWT’s Dehcho region to tour Suncor’s operation and talk to native groups in northern Alberta about what he called a serious decline of the quantity and quality of water in the NWT. In news reports, Norwegian was quoted as saying, “We need immediate action. The tarsands should be looked at and reviewed.”
Sonny MacDonald couldn’t agree more. A giant of a man with an equally outsized personality, MacDonald is a Fort Smith-based artist, a councillor with the local Salt River First Nation, and the aboriginal representative on the federal-territorial Mackenzie River Basin Board. He has lived his whole life along the Slave watershed, and, as he makes clear one summer afternoon over a plate of bannock on his sunny back porch, he feels passionately about its conservation. “Look at all the megaprojects down there, and the amount of water that’s going to be injected as steam into the ground,” he booms, shaking his head. “The river’s not gonna take it.”
MacDonald speaks with frustration about the tarsands’ relationship will local aboriginals – one he says aboriginals approached from a position of trust, but which industry has not reciprocated. Case in point was a tour he took of the tarsands last winter. Photography was prohibited, he says, and the whole exercise felt like a cover-up. Yet the impacts on the Slave can’t be hidden. “The change is there,” he says, gesturing toward the river. “People who’ve lived off the land since Moby Dick was a little minnow – they notice the change in the lands and the waters. And the change isn’t gradual. It’s very noticeable.”
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Northern aboriginal leaders like MacDonald and Herb Norwegian may be at the vanguard of tarsands opposition, but lately, even the government of the NWT has been paying attention. Bob Bailey, deputy minister of the NWT’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources, was quoted in the press this winter as saying the NWT wants a say in future tarsands development. “People in the communities have noticed water levels on the Slave River have been down. People in communities in northern Alberta noticed the same thing. We want to make sure Alberta deals with water in an equitable manner,” Bailey says.
The NWT government has made some moves to alert the Alberta government, which issues many of the water licences for tarsands operators, and the industry about its concerns. It sent a written submission in the fall of 2006 to Alberta’s Oil Sands Multistakeholders Committee. The submission outlined the territory’s concerns about tarsands developments. In March, the Alberta government’s assistant deputy minister responsible for tarsands environmental management, Jay Nagendran, met with Bailey and his staff to talk about how the NWT could be considered in future policy directions involving the industry. And then there is the bilateral water management agreement the NWT and Alberta have just started to hammer out. The agreement will detail how water flowing downstream from Alberta into the NWT will be managed.
Bailey believes that agreement is an important one. It will give the territories a say in how water is used even though some of those waterways, like the Athabasca River, are located within the Alberta border. NWT residents might be skeptical of how receptive a powerhouse province like Alberta might be to consulting with the NWT on anything. But Bailey sounds happy with how the Alberta government has responded to the NWT’s concerns. “We’ve got a pretty good working relationship with Alberta,” Bailey says. “We’ve talked about these issues. They’re keen to work with us to sort these things out.”
Sorting it all out will be a huge task and the agreement is expected to take three years to complete. In the meantime, the industry’s water intake will continue unabated and new projects will be approved and up-and-running before the agreement is finalized. That leads some to wonder if the NWT’s response to the problem might be coming too late. Bailey doesn’t think so. “Whether or not we’re too late is debatable,” Bailey says. “We’ve been working on this for quite some time. We’re working as hard as we can to conclude this stuff.”
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But Michael Miltenberger, a Fort Smith resident and the area’s elected member of the territorial legislative assembly, thinks more must be done. He says it’s going to take more than the territorial government’s limited political clout to force the Alberta government and industry to operate differently and use less water. For him, the NWT’s strength is in banding together and speaking with one voice on the issue. This has yet to happen. “We’ve never formally indicated as a territory that we are seriously concerned about the pace of development and river and water issues,” Miltenberger says. “We should be taking an active role on how we are going to represent ourselves on these transboundary agreements. We should be intervening in these tarsands hearings in northern Alberta and making the case for our concerns.”
Attempting to do so, however, will be waging war with a giant. So far, the Alberta environment department hasn’t yet acknowledged that there is a connection between tarsands development and low water levels on its rivers. “When we look at our figures, in terms of actual withdrawals, we don’t believe the withdrawals are having that kind of an impact,” Bev Yee, Environment Alberta’s assistant deputy minister of environmental stewardship, told the CBC in March.
At the same time, David Pryce, vice-president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, says the industry is very much aware of how important the issue of water is to the people living in northern Alberta and the NWT and the concerns they have about the water its been taking from the Athabasca River. He says that awareness has led to continual improvements in the recycling of water used in the tarsands process where wastewater is placed in tailings ponds, treated and used again. Pryce says the water licences issued to tarsands projects requires them to recycle 90 to 95 percent of the water they take, and the industry complies. He also points out the industry is continually looking at technology that will reduce water consumption. “Water handling is expensive,” Pryce says. “Anything we can do to minimize costs, there is an economic incentive to do that.” Still, Pryce admits that as the tarsands industry grows and production ramps up in northern Alberta, its water needs are growing despite improvements in recycling and testing technologies that will eliminate or reduce the need for water.
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Almost one year after the Slave River seemed to be drying up, there is a bit of good news. This June, a month after break-up, the Slave was flowing high and vast, lapping at vegetation that just last summer was several metres above the waterline. Water flow graphs confirm it: The river, at least for now, is back to a normal volume. Experts say the yo-yoing of the river’s water levels could be a sign of the times: As climate change becomes more pronounced, lakes and rivers may be subjected to more extremes – higher highs and lower lows. So, it’s possible the tarsands’ increasing thirst for water might not be having a big an impact on the quantity and quality of Northern water.
But from his office not far from the Slave, Fort Smith MLA Michael Miltenberger says you can never be too vigilant when it comes to protecting a resource like water. He cautions NWT residents from letting their guard down on this front. They need to keep watching water levels and what Alberta and the tarsands are doing. “The land is our bank. If we spend it all and don’t do it right. There’s no going back,” Miltenberger says. “We need to be stewards, not just for today but for generations to come.”
