In 2018, over four months, a group of scientists took more than a dozen flights over the Athabasca oil sands in Canada, which is one of the largest deposits of bitumen in the world.
In a plane strapped with carbon dioxide analyzers, the scientists flew close to mining facilities which extract and convert the sludgy mix of heavy crude, water, sand, and clay from beneath Alberta’s boreal forest into a usable synthetic oil. The goal was to assess what impact the industry’s emissions were having downwind on air and water quality, the land, and wildlife.
Recently the findings which was published surprised both the research team and environmental campaigners alike. The total carbon emissions from mining companies in the area exceeded what the industry was self-reporting by 1900 percent to over 6300 percent.
According to the scientists, the emissions measured represented approximately 1 percent of extracted petroleum and were equivalent to those from all other sources across Canada.
They also realized that the total oil sands carbon emissions were larger than those from all human-made sources, from chemical products to cars, in megacities like Los Angeles.
Local Indigenous communities and environmental groups have long warned that oil sand operations, which are costly and use massive amounts of water, take a heavy toll on the surrounding environment, human health, and the climate crisis at large.
Keith Stewart, from Greenpeace Canada said that, in measuring the astonishing and largely unreported levels of health-damaging air pollution coming out of oil sands operations, these scientists have confirmed what downwind Indigenous communities have been saying for years. This is making people sick, so our governments should ask these companies to use some of their record-breaking profits to clean up the mess they’ve made.
At the three highest-emitting facilities discovered by the study – Syncrude Mildred Lake, Suncor, and Canadian Natural Resources – emission rates were 20 to 64 times greater than those in the Alberta Emissions Inventory Report and Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory, tallies those industrial facilities are required to provide.
According to Alberta’s provincial government, there is currently no limit on oil sands emissions, either by facility or industry-wide.
The new study, published in the American Association for the Advancement of Science journal, is part of a larger project assessing oil sand pollution being conducted by the governments of Canada and Alberta along with Indigenous communities and industry, and involving scientists from Yale and Peking universities.
The traditional way of measuring and monitoring emissions from industrial operations like oil sands is to focus on limited subsets of the gases released into the atmosphere and assume that this accounts for most emissions.
But according to the aircraft study, which was accompanied by lab testing, showed that there were many gases unaccounted for in the atmosphere.
The scientists examined emissions from both surface mining operations as well as extraction taking place from deeper deposits of bitumen, the latter of which has been less well-researched despite increasing production. The study also noted the importance of post-extraction waste management to overall carbon emissions.
Drew Gentner, associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering at Yale, and Dr John Liggio, an EEEC research scientist, said that a smaller, aircraft-led study in 2016 found that downwind pollution of particulate matter (PM2.5) from the oil sands facilities was equivalent to a major city like Toronto.
The more extensive 2018 study revealed not only the magnitude of the underlying emissions causing air quality impacts but how the emissions reporting and routine monitoring methods missed these pollutants.
They mentioned that, still, the magnitude of emissions observed from oil sands operations was surprising, compared both to their reported emissions and to the total from all anthropogenic sources across Canada.
These emission underestimates were observed at the more well-known surface mining operation sand also from in situ extraction facilities that represent over half of the production.
They said the findings highlighted the importance of comprehensive measurements that look for missing emissions as well as considering pollutants throughout the life-cycle of the industrial operations.
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