Energy regulator okays Alberta’s ninth open-pit oil sands mine
JOSH WINGROVE
Edmonton— Globe and Mail Update
Published Thursday, Feb. 03, 2011
Despite mounting criticism from academics and the federal government over Alberta’s patchwork environmental monitoring regime, a provincial energy regulator approved the province’s ninth open-pit oil sands mine last week.
The approval is based on data from the Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program, an industry-led body that has been the subject of extensive, pointed criticism from three separate reports over the past two months.
Despite all that, last week’s approval of the Joslyn mine project for French energy giant Total SA acknowledges the questions but nonetheless accepts RAMP’s belief that a new mine would “have no significant adverse environmental effect on water quality.”
It noted the reviews “suggested that there may be some detectable cumulative effects” of pollution, but “on the basis of the RAMP data, no reason to believe that these effects are significant.”
Environmentalists were left wondering how RAMP’s data can be widely criticized as incomplete, and then relied upon for approval of a major new project. Four days after it was approved, RAMP released another third-party review that showed its data was incomplete and required an overhaul.
“This latest decision seems to be a step backwards,” said Bill Donahue, a special advisor with Water Matters, an Alberta-based research group.
“If you get a scientist to read any RAMP reports, within a very short period of time you can conclude there are major problems with the program... It would suggest to me that a regulator shouldn’t be able to rely upon that.”
Davis Sheremata, a spokesman for the provincial regulator, the Energy Resources Conservation Board, said that any changes sparked by ongoing reviews of RAMP will be in place long before the new mine’s projected start date in 2017 – making it unnecessary to delay approval in the meantime.
Total’s operation will need to meet “not just the standards as they exist now, but as they evolve through the life of the project,” Mr. Sheremata said in an e-mailed statement.
The Joslyn mine will be located about 70 kilometres northwest of Fort McMurray, Alta. At full capacity, it will produce 100,000 barrels a day of crude oil.
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