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Oil sands tries to move past ducks
Gary Park For Petroleum News
It’s an issue the Alberta oil sands sector just can’t duck, but the industry is doing whatever it can to put distance between itself and 1,606 dead ducks at the Syncrude Canada operations last year.
The industry has sent one of its chief spokesman on the road to put a different perspective on the waterfowl episode that is now the overriding public image of the Alberta resource.
And oil sands giant Suncor Energy has submitted an application to the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board and Alberta Environment to speed up the reclamation of tailings ponds, a toxic sludge where the ducks — a small fraction of those killed during the hunting season — came to a messy end last year.
Meanwhile, the Syncrude consortium has pleaded not guilty to charges in the duck deaths. The trial is set to begin March 2010 in Alberta Provincial Court.
Suncor, which pioneered oil sands production 40 years ago, said its plans for tailings ponds will allow reclamation to begin in as few as seven years compared with the 40 years it now takes.
It said a patented technology, which has been under study for six years, allows mature fine tailings to be pumped from the ponds by using a polymer agent to separate water from the tailings, thus reducing the number and size of tailings ponds.
Suncor Executive Vice President Kirk Bailey said the new treatment “will help us meet new provincial regulatory requirements and, just as importantly, the changing expectations of stakeholders.”
Fine particle reduction ordered The Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board has ordered oil sands producers to reduce fine particles in liquids tailings by 20 percent by June 30, 2011, and by 50 percent by 2013.
Simon Dyer, oil sands program director with the Pembina Institute, said he was “cautiously positive” about Suncor’s proposal, but said his environmental organization would not shift from its call for a moratorium on new or expanded oil sands projects until all environmental questions were resolved.
Under that directive, bitumen mining companies had a Sept. 30 deadline to submit their plans to meet the new standards.Six met that target — Albian Sands Energy (operated by Royal Dutch Shell), Canadian Natural Resources, Imperial Oil, Shell Canada, Suncor and Syncrude.
The inventory of fine tailings that require long-term containment covers about 16 square miles in northeastern Alberta.
To counter the growing criticism of the oil sands business, Marcel Coutu, chief executive officer of Canadian Oil Sands Trust, which owns 36.74 percent of Syncrude, spread a message in Eastern Canada that the industry is “trying to get beyond ducks.”
“My personal objective is to instill a sense of pride in Canadians about what this asset really is to us,” he said.
“We’re trying to tell people, ‘Listen, this is a Canadian world-class asset, this is not an Alberta backyard money-making operation.’ More than half the revenues from the oil sands and taxes go to the federal government … paying for health, education (and) infrastructure,” Coutu said.
He also said that the tailings ponds result from mining operations, which account for only 15 percent of the resource, while 85 percent is extracted using technologies such as steam injection.”
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