I advise you once more, like I did in a a previous article, to watch this report from Québec (if ever you can understand French). In this report, they remind us that oil sands extend over an area bigger than Florida and oil reserves are five times higher than the Saudi Arabia’s, in the boreal forest of Northern Alberta.

In this article, I won’t explain in detail every environmental problem caused by the extraction of oil sands, but I will write about an aspect that drew my curiosity : recovery of soils and particularly of forests. To throw light on it, Bruce Larson, professor and head of the Forest Resources Management Department at the UBC (University of British Columbia), talks about his work for Syncrude, an oil sand company extracting in Alberta since 1978 and owning the biggest oil sands pit in the world. The website of Radio Canada dedicated to this topic (still in French) also helped me to complete this article.

Syncrude approached Bruce Larson and his colleague Craig Farnden to improve the fertilization of soils. This company is "mandated by the province of Alberta to restore forest to a comparable commercial value." Like other companies, they have been engaging universities to look at what they are doing (they have been planting new trees for more than a decade). They share a lot of information on this field, in conferences for example.

Bruce and his colleague went to see the pit and Syncrude showed them what they do to fill the big wholes. The process just consists in filling the wholes with sands that have been removed and, on the top, top soil and peat are mixed together (up to 1m). Then they plant jack pines. So Bruce and Craig are testing several fertilizers on these lands to grow jack pines and try to determinate which one is the best to grow jack pines the way they used to grow. But, as Bruce admitted, they try to know whether the pines are growing and not how they are growing. It seems to be too soon to say if they are growing correctly or not.

So, like Léo Paquin, biologist manager of territory recovery for Suncor (extracting oil sands in Alberta since 1967), says : "Recovery is simple. [...] We do some monitoring but, basically, we let nature do its work." Can you confirm Mr Larson ? Is it simple ? "Yes, it is incredibly simple. The question then is "have we recreated the ecosystem ?"" Indeed, the ecosystem suffer changes. One of them is that dry and wet areas changed : there used to be large wet areas and they are now fragmented into much smaller ones. "It’s too early to tell if there will be some rough implications, but that’s one thing they should be checking". Another thing Craig noticed is that there are variations in trees growth, "which is totally normal", but they wonder if it is related to the material put back in the soil. That’s why they are doing researches on this point.

One of the biggest concerns of these two researchers was the sands left after oil is removed from it by treatments. Chemicals, sulfur and lots of salt are in this sand. What does it become ? I still don’t know. Nevertheless, even if this treated sand is (was ?) used to fill the wholes, it wouldn’t disturb the growth of the jack pines, according to Bruce Larson, since trees’ roots are on the top meter (where a mix of peat and soil is put back).

Anyway, even if the process is simple "the details have to be watched very carefully". And, about biodiversity, he explains that "if you’re creating a new plantation it’s difficult to start right-off getting biodiversity". To recreate a new biodiversity, the "key" is how they manage the transition between the first rotation plantation and the second one. In Alberta, one rotation might be 50 or 60 years, and "we are not there yet". So the recreation of the biodiversity depends on your time scale. Thus, we have to accept that this issue can only be treated on the long term and the results on the short term can hardly be measured.

Eventually, what is important to know is if the ecosystem will suffer any damage at the end of the process. To answer to this concern, Bruce Larson compares the operations of extractions of oil sands to the eruption of the Mount Saint Helens in the state of Washington in 1980. A vast area was covered with ash but the ecosystem recovered faster than the experts thought. Is this ecosystem the same as before the eruption ? "Absolutely not", but it is a "functionning viable forest system". In the forests of Alberta, it is the same : they are not creating "an exact replica of what they took off" but a functionning ecosystem. "I wouldn’t agree to say that it’s a disaster. The companies are working very hard and the province of Alberta is watching very carefully". And Bruce concludes : "These things happen all the time. This destruction of an ecosystem is caused by humans. Does that make it special ? I don’t know. That’s an ethical question."

So when I asked him whether these operations were a disaster, he answered that "no, as I wouldn’t say Mount St Helens was a disaster" and that "the companies are working very hard and the province of Alberta is watching very carefully". Ah, now I am not worried any more. And when I mentionned the dangerousness of chemicals, he prefered avoid the issue : "I don’t even know what are the chemicals used".

Instead of telling you that this professor was hired by an oil company, I’d prefer to say that it’s up to each one to make one’s opinion. As you may have understood, I made mine.

Now, how to conclude such an article without being clumsy ? By letting a expert do it ! An expert of the situation, not of conclusions... Thus, I yield the floor to Gray Jones, forestry biologist and director of the environmental group The Western Canada Wilderness Comity, who will tell us his point of view on the operations of extraction of oil sands in Alberta : "I am not an hypocrite : we need oil and gasoline, it’s the law of convenience. Everybody does it. It’s just the scope of the projects and how fast it developped. [...] It’s developped without the appropriate technology. If we went slower, we could consequently adapt the technology."

See you soon, Be green, Ben