| The future of a major wetland in northern Alberta is looking increasingly bleak as Petro-Canada ramps up plans for an oilsands project within the McClelland Lake Wetland Complex. The company announced last week that it is moving ahead with the formal design of its Fort Hills oilsands project. The company estimates the 50-year project will cost $26 billion and the company eventually plans to extract 280,000 barrels of bitumen per day from the mine. Production is expected to start in 2011. In order to reach its production target of 280,000 barrels per day, the company plans to strip-mine half of the wetland.
The wetland contains a large patterned fen, 12 karst sinkhole lakes and McClellan Lake. A patterned fen is a type of wetland that combines low peat ridges with shallow pools of water. A karst sinkhole forms when an area of limestone bedrock is dissolved by groundwater. The Fort Hills project will destroy 45 per cent of the patterned fen and 49 per cent of the entire wetland complex. This is despite the fact that the Alberta government has categorized the patterned fen and McClellan Lake as having provincial environmental significance. The wetland is home to the Canadian toad and the short-eared owl, which the province has determined may be at risk of extinction, as well as sandhill cranes and black terns, which the province has categorized as sensitive species. Whooping cranes, an endangered species, have also been spotted in the wetlands.
Petro-Canada has also begun ramping up its public relations campaign, placing a full-page ad in the Calgary Herald on June 26. The ad featured a photo of a pitcher plant, a rare carnivorous plant that is found in the wetlands that Petro-Canada will be partially destroying. Petro-Canada stated in the ad it has made 180 promises related to the project. The company has promised to "manage the protected un-mined portion of the McClelland Lake Wetland Complex such that it remains a peat-forming rich fen with similar plant species and soil characteristics to predevelopment conditions" and to provide First Nations community representatives with a detailed reclamation plan prior to mining, among other promises.
Shirley Bray, who campaigned for the wetland for years on behalf of the Alberta Wilderness Association, is skeptical it’s possible to keep the unmined portion of the wetland intact when the other half is strip-mined. "If all their plans, whatever they might be, fail, then what? If the fen is destroyed and the lake is polluted are they going to have to pay a fine? And if so, how much is that going to be – $500?" She predicts "historically we’ll look back and say, ‘Weren’t we stupid’ and we’ll have the record of what was there."
The Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) approved the project in 2002. The project was originally put forward by TrueNorth Energy, which was bought out by Petro-Canada. In TrueNorth’s environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the project, the company acknowledged that mining half of the wetland complex would lower the water level in the other half of the wetland, which would kill certain plant species and prevent peat lands from forming. The EIA also predicted that water quality in the un-mined portion of the wetland, as well as McClellan Lake would be negatively impacted. The Alberta government also stated during the EUB hearings on the proposed mine that the project would indirectly damage the un-mined portion by altering water levels and elevating the concentrations of certain chemicals. However, both TrueNorth and the Alberta government argued that it was possible to create a mitigation plan to protect the un-mined portion of the wetland.
Bray says the fact that Petro-Canada has been given permission to destroy half of a major wetland is indicative of how oilsands development is completely overtaking environmental protection. "It just shows what we’re willing to destroy in the path of oilsands," she says. "I just think whatever stands in the way of oilsands will be just moved aside, and if it gets destroyed in the process, well that’s too bad."
Joyce Hildebrand, conservation specialist at the Alberta Wilderness Association, who has taken over the McClelland Lake Wetland campaign from Bray, says once a chunk of the wetland is ripped up, that’s the end of it.
"There’s no way to reclaim a patterned fen. Nobody has ever shown that this can be done. There’s no evidence whatsoever that it can be done. They may turn it into a grazing pasture of something like that, but that’s not a patterned fen. This has taken 8,000 years to develop," she says.
She says protection of the wetland hasn’t been a huge public priority because it’s in a remote area and very few people have seen it. "We have to work doubly or triply hard to raise people’s awareness of this area and I think if people understand it and see images of it and hear about the process whereby this has happened, which is extremely sobering, they would be irate," she says.
McClelland Lake Wetland was nominated for protection under the province’s Special Places 2000 initiative. The program involved extensive consultation with Albertans about what new areas in the province should become protected areas. The wetlands were also protected from development under the province’s 1996 Fort McMurray-Athabasca Oil Sands Subregional Integrated Resource Plan (IRP). However, the Alberta government amended the IRP in order to allow development in the wetland.
"The whole process showed that no matter what anybody said or did, this is going ahead despite having agreed that this was an area that urgently needed to be protected," says Hildebrand.
Hildebrand is also concerned about the fact that the provincial government has handed out oilsands leases for what she estimates to be three-quarters of the area around McClellan Lake. She says if mining around the lake proceeds "the entire watershed would be destroyed." McClelland Lake flows into the Firebag River, which flows into the Athabasca River.
She remains hopeful the wetland can still be saved, but it won’t be easy. "It would take enormous political will to make that happen. We would have to put huge pressure on the government," she says.
Michelle Harries, spokesperson for Petro-Canada, says the company has created a McClelland Lake Wetland Complex Sustainability Committee, comprised of representatives from government, First Nations and one environmental representative, to come up with a plan to protect the unmined portion of the wetland and to reclaim the rest. She says mining in the wetland portion of Petro-Canada’s project won’t happen until 2025 at the earliest.
Josh Stewart, spokesperson for Alberta Environment, says Petro-Canada will be required to prove "any mining activity is not going to have any adverse effects on the other part they’re not mining" before proceeding. |
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