When Stephanie Green and a team of seven other scientists first began their latest research study more than two years ago in Vancouver, she said they were driven by curiosity.
Green, a Canadian, is a Banting post-doctoral fellow at Stanford
When Stephanie Green and a team of seven other scientists first began their latest research study more than two years ago in Vancouver, she said they were driven by curiosity.
Green, a Canadian, is a Banting post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University in California. She specializes in marine ecology and conservation science.
Most people knew that there was research underway on local impacts of Canada's oilsands industry, which sits in the middle of North America, hundreds of kilometres away from the coasts. But the team of eight scientists wanted to see how much scientific research had been completed on how the industry might affect the oceans.
By the end of their review, which involved scrutinizing 9,260 different research papers, the scientists concluded that there are a lot of things we don’t know about how Alberta's oilsands industry might alter the planet's oceans.
Overall, the scientists found 15 different ways that the oilsands industry — in a Canadian prairie province that’s home to the world’s third largest reserve of crude oil after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela — can cause “stress” or “disturbances” to the oceans.
The findings were published Tuesday in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment in the midst of what the authors call an "intense public policy debate" about the future of energy.
Ten of 15 oilsands impacts on oceans are 'certain'
The scientists found that at least 10 of these impacts are “certain” to happen from new coastal development, ocean shipping, climate change and the risk of spills of bitumen, the heavy oil found in natural deposits of sand and clay in northern Alberta's oilsands. The other impacts would be probable, according to the study, which underwent a rigorous peer review.
Possible impacts would include disruptions to organisms from the waves and noise of ships, collisions with marine life, the introduction of potentially invasive species, as well as contamination from spills or the products used to clean up after disasters. The study also reviewed larger impacts that are caused by development in the oilsands and other industries such as climate change, ocean acidification and sea level rise.
"The extent of public information varies greatly, from little known effects of bitumen products in oceans to well-established consequences of climate change,"according to the study.
Bitumen is too heavy to flow freely in a pipeline in ambient temperatures. So it must be shipped after being diluted in a toxic solution, sometimes using a formula that is considered to be an industry trade secret. This product, known as dilbit, could react differently in water when compared to other forms of crude oil that have previously been implicated in spills such as the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster off the coast of Alaska in March 1989 or the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster of April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. The secret formula used to ship bitumen could also make it difficult for responders to figure out how to clean up after a spill, the new paper said.
The new study — Oil sands and the marine environment: current knowledge and future challenges — was published less than a month after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government approved two major pipeline expansion projects, Enbridge’s Line 3 replacement from Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin in the U.S. midwest, and Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion project from Alberta to the Vancouver region on the west coast of B.C.
Together, these projects, if completed, would add more than one million barrels per day of capacity to Canada’s pipeline infrastructure. But they are fiercely opposed by many First Nations leaders, environmentalists and some local mayors who say they pose to great a risk of spills, while pushing the country’s climate change goals out of reach.
The latest research from the scientists adds evidence into the debate that was missing when Trudeau announced his government's decisions.
“As Canadians, I think we often think about what’s happening with our fossil fuel industry, particularly around the oilsands being inland — inland Canada — and looking at the environment there,” said Green, the study’s lead author, in an interview with National Observer. “But as we’re seeing increasing pressure to transport this product globally, it’s connecting that type of industry to the ocean in ways that most of us don’t really consider.”
The Trudeau government and industry have said that they are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that new oilsands projects and pipelines will be safe and responsible. This includes an "historic" $1.5 billion federal plan to protect the oceans that was announced by Trudeau in November.
But the new research paper has recommended that governments should improve environmental assessments and oversight of industrial projects to fill the gaps in knowledge.
Otherwise, Green and her co-authors — Kyle Demes, Michael Arbeider, Wendy Palen, Anne Salomon, Thomas Sisk, Margo Webster and Maureen Ryan — warn that there's a risk when project pro