Oil sands pollution in Canada worse than industry and government claim

By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com
December 07, 2009 Canada’s tar sands have been internationally criticized as one of the world’s largest industrial sources of greenhouse gases, but the energy-intensive extraction of oil also has a less-noted impact on the local environment. A new study shows that the Alberta’s oil sands are likely releasing more PACs (polycyclic aromatic compounds) into nearby Athabasca River and its tributaries than the industry-funded and government-supported Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program (RAMP) has reported. Sampling widely in 2008, researchers found that snow was contaminated with PACs for almost 50 kilometers around the oil sands complex. They also found that dissolved PAC contamination was higher downriver than upriver of the oil sands project. “Some residents of downstream Fort Chipewyan are convinced that the oil sands industry is responsible for higher than expected cancer rates,” explain the study’s authors. “However, government, industry and related agencies, relying in part on the joint [RAMP], report that effects are minimal.” RAMP also claims that the heavier-than-normal concentrations of contaminants in the Athabasca are naturally-occurring and not due to the mining of the oil-sands. … A critic of the project, writer and activist George Monbiot, recently visited the oil sands. “Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale,” Monbiot wrote in the Guardian. …