The only “blow to the Keystone pipeline” is in the exaggerated reporting of the science…
The “report” (Kurek et al., 2013) did find slight elevations (relative to 1950) of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in five lakes in the vicinity of the Fort McMurray, near oil sand mining and upgrading operations in NE Alberta. The PAH flux trends in four of the lakes were unremarkable compared to the control (Namur Lake). One lake (NE20) exhibited PAH levels similar to urban and agricultural areas. The other four lakes were very similar to remote lakes in the Canadian Rockies and boreal forests.
This is Figure 1 from Kurek et al., 2013…
The lakes around Fort McMurray clearly do exhibit some increase in PAH flux since 1950. The winds in the area are generally southerly. So, it makes sense that SW22 and SE22 exhibit the least increase in PAH flux; while NE13 and NE20 exhibit the greatest increase. However, apart from NE20, the PAH fluxes aren’t remarkable when compared to Lake Namur. There does seem to be some evidence of minor wind-driven pollution in the lakes to the north of site AR6.
The supplemental information included a comparison table of PAH levels in the study area and in distant urban and remote settings. I transcribed those data to Excel in order to put the oil sands pollution into perspective.
Three of the four oil sands sites had lower PAH concentrations than Namur Lake. Only one of the sites (NE20) was comparable to lakes in urban and agriculturally developed areas.
I noticed that two of the remote, boreal forest sites (PAD 18) had maximum PAH fluxes in 1758 and 1810. So I plotted the PAH concentrations and fluxes against the year in which the maximum flux occurred.
This clearly demonstrates that the PAH “pollution” associated with oil sands development is insignificant. The PAH concentrations in most of lakes in the study area are unremarkable when compared to remote lakes in the boreal forest in the 18th and 19th century and are more similar to modern remote lakes than they are to urban and agriculturally developed areas.
Reference
Joshua Kurek, Jane L. Kirk, Derek C. G. Muir, Xiaowa Wang, Marlene S. Evans, and John P. Smol. Legacy of a half century of Athabasca oil sands development recorded by lake ecosystems. PNAS 2013 ; published ahead of print January 7, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1217675110
Well the answer is obvious; 4-H club stuff.
If those oil sands are polluting the Canadian lakes, then we should get the stuff out of there pronto.
It’s a win win situation; remove a pollutant, and get energy as well.
“””””…..Stephen Rasey says:
January 11, 2013 at 12:42 am
Bar charts should never be plotted against logarithmic axes! It is a visual deception……”””””
Well beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t have a problem with log bar charts; so long as the measurement technology is accurate enough to ensure the significance of those way down in the mud values. As usual, a chart like this is les informative, when it doesn’t contain any error range bars.
If this same data were to be plotted on a linear scale, then it would be truly deceptive, showing most of the observed measurements as essentially zero.
It is up to the experts, as to whether any of these leve;ls is a hazard. It seems to have become fashionable to treat any measureable value as being unacceptibly toxic.
It seems like everything is toxic except Oxygen and Calcium; and even Oxygen is toxic at about five times atmospheric levels. I really don’t know how life ever got started on this planet in the face of all these insurmountable obstacles.
The Athabasca River flows from the Rocky Mountains to the Arctic. Fort McMurray is the hub of the Oil Sands development and is on the banks of the River. Everything between Fort McMurray and the Rockies is considered upriver.
If you put an aluminum boat or canoe in the Athabasca upriver from Fort McMurray and paddle along for 20 minutes, then haul it up on the bank and turn the boat over, the underside of the boat is coated in oil. It’s in the water. It oozes out of the banks. The Jesuits who wrote the early history of the area (1700s/1800s) told of the Indians who used the heavy pitch to waterproof their boats.
The oil companies already do that in Alberta. They have to by law, or they can’t drill and they are fined big-time (millions). There is also a jail sentence if you fail to do this.
When Oil was discovered in Leduc, AB in1949, Premier Manning said c’mon up, drill all you want to, but there are three rules, which I am going to turn into provincial laws:
(1) the province gets a royalty from every barrel you pull out
(2) you have to build all roads into, out of, and around, the site according to DoT standards, which we will verify
(3) you must leave the ground in the same or better condition in which you found it.
The latter became the basis for something called the Land Reclamation Laws. The Alberta Premier (a conservative, btw) tightened the laws in 1970 after the Oil Sands exploration started. Oil companies had to preserve all flora, all trees (boreal forest trees in particular are crooked looking, almost moonscapey because of the oil in the ground), top soil, significant grasses, the works, in a separate region and pay biologists to protect them for as long as it takes. Birds and wildlife monitoring was essential. The tailing ponds have to be managed. The first ‘mine’ was restored two decades later (1990) after everything was returned to the original site and additional flora added to improve the area. The oil company got its Land Reclamation Certificate and avoided the fines. (Suncor did a video of a tailing pond and how they managed it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbmIFiM9lCY&feature=plcp You won’t see anything like it in any other oil region in the world.)
The Reclamation Laws have been tightened several times since Peter Loughheed (spelling?) tightened them in 1970, most recently 2009 (I think). They apply to anything you take out of the ground in Alberta: uranium, coal, gold, water in your backyard. Gas company employees have to do it if they rip up your property to lay pipe. You cannot do strip-mining in Alberta without restoring what you did to the environment. You cannot lop off tops of mountains or hills. This is something that the hysteric Bill McKibben knows nothing about; ditto the Eastern Canadian environmentalists who have never set foot in the province and make fanciful claims from Toronto about damaging the environment. They have no clue.
The specific Athabasca Tar Sands area they decided on before the oil exploration began was a barren region of charcoal gray sand (Mother Nature’s Oil Spill) with small twisty trees that looked like blackened cactus. The bitumen-soaked sand was right at the surface. They just scooped it up and steamed it.
The recent change in reclamation laws are even stricter. Reclamation plans can take anywhere from a few months to a year before oil companies get government approval to start mining (you don’t drill in the Oil Sands, you mine the sand with steam to extract it, now usually in situ deep underground).
Alberta has the strictest reclamation laws in Canada, and they did it decades before the environment became an issue. They have decades of knowledge about how to handle your concerns, Peter.
The Athabasca River flows from the Rocky Mountains to the Arctic. Fort McMurray is the hub of the Oil Sands development and is on the banks of the River. Everything between Fort McMurray and the Rockies is considered upriver.
If you put an aluminum boat or canoe in the Athabasca upriver from Fort McMurray and paddle along for 20 minutes, then haul it up on the bank and turn the boat over, the underside of the boat is coated in oil. It’s in the water. It oozes out of the banks. From the Royal Society of Canada’s “Environmental and Health Impacts of Canada’s Oil Sands Industry” 440-page Dec 2010 report, page 16.
http://rsc-src.ca/en/expert-panels/rsc-reports/environmental-and-health-impacts-canadas-oil-sands-industry
John West says:
January 11, 2013 at 6:34 am
…..My research suggests that a lifetime of living is fatal.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Life is Lethal.
(But don’t tell the EPA that or they will ban life)
Stephen Rasey says:
January 11, 2013 at 11:31 am
pH (as in acid/base) and dB (as in loudness) are “linear in log” common measurements. I don’t have a problem with those. But that doesn’t mean you should plot city populations on log bar chart.
###
WOW you really don’t understand much do you. You sure as hell know nothing about data visualization nor do you know anything about water testing, either that or your deliberately lying. I either case, anything you have to say is worthless. I have been involved with both professionally so I know you are full of BS. I just hope no-one here is taken in by your idiotic distractions.
There is no point talking to you anyways because all you really care about is denigrating the article, and I feel no need to prove myself to a fool. BTW, I just showed your comments to some co-workers and they are laughing their off.
To everyone else:
The use of a log scale is valid for exactly the same reason that PH is a log measurement. The only difference is that it was useful to have a Log Metric scale for PH but more importantly, it was possible to HAVE a Log Metric because PH has a natural reference point, which is needed to architect such a metric metric. Stephen is just blowing smoke. His attempt to equate this with a linear metric that is useful for most tasks (but not all!) involving populations, is complete stupidity.
Graeme No.3 says:
January 11, 2013 at 8:47 am
…..Note also the use of nanograms. In that area the analyst has to be very careful about contaminants…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes, when you get down to ppb and nanograms you use the glassware once and toss it (or give it to the production lab) and even then you have to be careful of contamination.
FWIW in the 1970’s we considered it very good just to get down to 3 to 5 ppm. At that point the EPA was using “None Detected” as the cut off. then the analytical chemistry equipment improved and the fecal material really hit the rotating blade as “None Detected” continued to be enforced but the engineering needed to meet ppb instead of ppm had not been invented.
Peter van Driel says:
January 11, 2013 at 8:50 am
…. This may lead to isolating vegetation or microorganisms that are tolerant of, or even consume, petroleum hydrocarbons, and they could be used to help treat oil spill areas elsewhere.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
From what I have seen vegetation could care less about oil spills. Boiling water will kill a lot faster than oil will.
Folks, lets keep it real. The numerous comments in this thread trivializing the environmental challenges associated with extraction of bitumen from the bituminous sands of northern Alberta may be cute, but having spent 25 years of my life tackling those challenges I can assure you they are real.
And can be managed.
This study is typical of environmental impact assessment in that region. Fifty years down the path of large scale production, billions of barrels of upgraded synthetic crude oil shipped, and a study of this nature typically finds just enough of a chemical change in the environment to warrant confidence in the sampling and analytical techniques employed. Yes, I could be accused of over-generalization, but certainly for this particular study that is a valid characterization: it appears PAH levels have increased in certain lakes, in a pattern that correlates with location and wind direction relative to the heavy oil upgraders. So perhaps causation?
In this case, the data can be contrasted to other areas, and the appropriate degree of alarm can be assessed by any numerate person. As has been done by the author of this post and the more serious commenters on this thread.
Nobody does lies, deception and fearmongering like the Eco Greenie Hairy Scary Kool Aide chuggers.
Because their careers and economic future depends on keeping the scam alive, keeping the grift going, finding new marks to film-flam.
History will not be kind to the perpetrators of the Great Global Warming scam.
@policycritic: Hooray for Canada! What you describe seems to be a marriage of good business and well thought-out regulations. Why don’t we hear more about this, here (USA)?
@eo:
Nope. NOT talking dioxin at all.
http://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/programme/programme_rafs/programme_rafs_fc_01_06_pah.html
As a random sample first to come up in the search (why is it from Hong Kong?) pick…
PAH is what makes BBQ taste like BBQ, IMHO… Yum!
So they found BBQ sauce in the dirt, eh? 😉 (Yeah, I know, different PAH…)
@Caleb:
You say Christian Science Monitor then you “link” a CBS story. Totally un connected.
Why?
@garymount:
I use “tar” and “oil” slightly interchangeably for the tar-oil sands with the only real distinction being the average molecular weight of the hydrocarbon. I typically (but not always) use “oil sands” for Canada, “oil shale” for the lower content stuff in the USA and “Tar Sands” for the Orinoco deposits that have higher weight molecules.
I’m 100% “pro” use of them.
So, am I just not being PC enough for you? (IMHO, the answer to pc-word-crap from anti-oil folks is to deliberately use the term they are trying to demonize and with a positive and uplifting tone of voice if possible 😉
Properly, it’s often bituminous sand, but everyone looks at you funny when you use the right name…
@Gail:
Have to get me some of that oil juice… sounds useful…
@garymount:
I’m with you on the Log Chart. Log, linear, whatever. I was taught to look at the scales…
Some things best shown on one, some on others. I LIKE the Log chart more as it lets me see just how small the small stuff is AND variations between them (not just ‘gosh, they all disappear into the bottom’…) and as soon as I see the log scale on the bottom I know the ‘little stuff’ is entirely non-relevant.
Probably best to use both log and linear, though, so folks with biases who don’t read scales can be mollified…
(Then again, I grew up using a slide rule so ‘log’ is built into the brain… wonder if the ‘linear’ folks are the post slide rule generation?…)
@Dave:
That coffee cup wasn’t coffee? Gee, it sure looked just like mine… 😉
Wonder how much PAH is in coffee… (Most plant tannins and all qualify to some extent).
http://www.idph.state.il.us/cancer/factsheets/polycyclicaromatichydrocarbons.htm
Are you SURE that wasn’t coffee?… (don’t toss those old coffee grounds out for the worms, Joe, it’s gonna raise the PAH level in the meter downstream…) /sarc;>
The longer you can cast doubt on this, the more money the lawyers make………
Bruce Friesen says:
January 11, 2013 at 4:19 pm
Folks, lets keep it real. The numerous comments in this thread trivializing the environmental challenges associated with extraction of bitumen from the bituminous sands of northern Alberta may be cute, but having spent 25 years of my life tackling those challenges I can assure you they are real.
And can be managed.
This study is typical of environmental impact assessment in that region. Fifty years down the path of large scale production, billions of barrels of upgraded synthetic crude oil shipped, and a study of this nature typically finds just enough of a chemical change in the environment to warrant confidence in the sampling and analytical techniques employed.
==============================
So what is the environmental impact, Mr. Consultant?
DesertYote says:
January 11, 2013 at 3:01 pm
WOW you really don’t understand much do you. You sure as hell know nothing
============================
thus DesertYote
In the early years of evaluation of the oil sands, now half a century ago, I spent a very cold winter as a young geologist supervising a coring program to develop an understanding of the extent and the reserves of the deposit. At that time chemical studies of the water of the Athabasca River were also carried out by the Alberta Government and others.
Two things were clear at the time:
* The oil sands, exposed at the river banks, produced a sheen on the water; and the eroding poorly consolidated sandstone banks contributed sand to the river bed downstream.
* The Lower Cetaceous sands of the McMurray formation are derived from the early Paleozoic Athabasca formation which in turn finds its sediment source in the erosion of the granites, gneisses and quartzites of the pre-Cambrian Canadian Shield.
As a result the outwash of these arenaceous deposits contains a number of minerals and heavy metals, which today would be called ‘pollutants’.
Much of this was already clear in those early years and a key publication is the “Proceedings of the Athabasca Oil Sands Conference” September 1951, Board of Trustees, Oil Sands Project, Gov’t of Alberta, – King’s Printer, Edmonton.
I am not saying that oil sands exploitation should not be watched closely as a potential contributor to pollution, but – as in many of this sort of studies – a proper base line should be established when interpreting current conditions. In the heat of the oil sand argument, this is often ignored.
Meanwhile, both the Alberta Government and the operators are effectively monitoring and regulating the processes and most criticizing visitors are impressed by what has been achieved.
mpainter says “So what is the environmental impact, Mr. Consultant?”
I will give you the benefit of doubt, and not label your post in the “cute” category. Having said that, it is not reasonable to expect a summary of environmental impact assessments running to thousands of pages in one blog comment. Therefore, I will not try. The documents are available from the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board web site.
Instead, I will repeat my contention the impacts, which are not zero, can be managed. It isn’t easy, and won’t be easy going forward. It will require continuing serious effort by scientists to describe the hazards. regulators to craft effective controls, companies to spend the resources to meet the regulations (and exceed the regulations if, as ethical operators, they conclude the regulations are too lax), and citizens to keep a close watch on both.
It can be done. “Policycritic” at 1:26 p.m. provided useful background on one aspect, that of land reclamation. Land reclamation can be done. It is not easy. It requires serious investment of science, serious money, serious commitment on the part of the organization that chewed up the land.
Relevance to the head post: since this is all such serious work, it is all the more important environmental assessment data is understood. In this case, putting in context PAH levels and trends relative to comparators can lead to appropriate regulatory action. Much more useful than “Look they have gone up! We have proven bitumen upgrading is evil”, or “nothing bad in that data!”.
As a small part of that, in my first comment I encouraged WUWT commentors to “keep it real” rather than taking “cute” shots from one side or the other. mpainter, can we agree on that?
May I suggest all of you read the very alarmist Abstract of this paper at
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/01/02/1217675110.full.pdf?with-ds=yes
I suggest that the data in this paper does NOT support the alleged state of high alarm.
Regards, Allan
@ur momisugly Bruce Friesen 10:40 Thanks for a voice of reason, part of the sarcasm on my part is the void between what we Canadians are actually doing, as you can attest, and the overblown claims of terrible harm to the environment by the propagandists.
Quite often by people who have not been to Canada, let alone Ft Mac.
Bruce Friesen says:
January 12, 2013 at 10:40 am
===========================
I refer you to the comment above at Albert Jacobs. Is this what you mean by “trivializing the environmental challenges”?
I note that you do not address the question of whether you are a consultant.
Now my point is this: if you are an environmental consultant (“having spent 25 years of my life tackling those challenges I can assure you they are real.”) then your comments are to be taken in a certain light. Albert Jacobs above makes it clear that the tar sands have ever been a source of what are classified today as pollutants, as one would expect from such an extensive surface deposit of “tar”. The issue is is whether anything has changed for the worse since exploitation began. That is the point of my question “So what is the environmental impact, Mr Consultant?”
Now Mr. Jacobs is a scientist, and he made some very pertinent observations in a forthcoming manner. Your comments are of a different quality.
I asked you a direct question which you excused yourself from addressing because of “impact assessments running thousands of pages” on another website. Then you proceeded with some general remarks which seemed to show your familiarity with the issues.
This sort of response does not serve you very well. You might think that it does, but if I were interviewing you for work, lights and buzzers would go off at such evasiveness.
mpainter
mpainter, in both my posts my intent was to encourage folks to take serious matters seriously; to forgo the temptation to trivialize things.
For such a complex industrial activity, a thumbnail version of “the environmental impact”, I would argue, is not useful. For me to respond to your question with a few glib sentences would be exactly the sort of non-serious dialogue I had in mind in my first comment.
I agree the aspect Albert Jacobs spoke to – a baseline against which to understand changes – is important. I agree his was a substantive post.
With respect to PAHs, the specific environmental change that is the subject of this post, I stated my opinion clearly in my first comment.
Forest fires also create natural PAHs, I wonder if they are separating the two.
Tom Fletcher of Victoria BC also debunks the reporting of this study: http://blogs.bclocalnews.com/victoria_view/tzeporah-berman-dude-you-are-off-my-facebook-page/1212
Thank you Bruce Friesen for your reasoned comments. We can spend our time weeping over spilt milk, or mop it up before it stinks the place out. One of the philosophies regularly expressed here at WUWT, is that instead of wasting money reducing CO2 output, we accept that warming is largely beyond human control and apply those resources to adaptation instead. That’s exactly what you’re suggesting re oil exploitation, but some commenters are getting frazzled around the edges. Strange.
We could prevent all road deaths by digging up all the roads and scrapping every car. Not a realistic solution. Your pragmatic approach is how we deal with problems in the real world.
Oldfossil
In fact, the CO2 is entirely beneficial, no adaptation needed, and the last warming trend ended before the turn of the century. Concerning exploitation of the tar sands, see the well-informed comment of Albert Jacobs above, which gives a much clearer picture of the situation than any comment by Friesen. Friesen seems reluctant to admit that tar sand exploitation has not harmed the environment.