Air Water Land - Land

Generations of lynxes, moose, deer, foxes and bears have come to take Imperial Oil Limited’s in situ oilsands installation at Cold Lake, Alta., for granted.

The oil and gas industry, province of British Columbia, and communities in that province have created an initiative that is designed to ease tension between industry and residents.

“In the last decade, rising crude oil prices, robust global crude oil demand, and oilsands growth have resulted in applications to expand existing crude oil pipelines and to construct new ones,” points out board chair Gaétan Caron. Capacity will increase greatly with the approval of the Keystone and the Alberta Clipper pipeline projects.

As Canadian oilsands mining projects face growing scrutiny from environmentalists around the world, Imperial Oil Ltd. will apply its 40 years of continuous improvement experience at Cold Lake, using advanced technologies to minimize the environmental impacts of its first oilsands mine at Kearl, according to the company’s top official.

Producers operating in the super-hot Horn River Basin in northeastern British Columbia are taking specific actions to ensure that environmental stewardship and stakeholder concerns are not being ignored.

There’s a story coming out of Alberta’s upstream oil and gas industry. It’s a tale of conspiracy, of meetings between people who don’t normally talk. Industry is involved. The government too. And as with many stories related to oil and gas, it involves quite a bit of dirt and ends with a major, long-lasting impact on the environment.

It has been described as a green scarf across the shoulders of North America.

Much is being said about the current state of the environment in the Wood Buffalo Region where oilsands operations take place. Environmental groups and Albertans alike are concerned about future impacts of intensive oilsands operations on air, water, and land—more specifically, the region’s flora and fauna. But what isn’t being talked about is how much reclamation has already taken place over the decades and will continue well into the future.

How are long-term impacts considered in the oilsands project application stage?

The good thing about being young is that you can do stuff just for fun because you don’t anticipate consequences.

In the area around active oilsands mines, the earth is bald and desert-like. This wasn’t the picture of the northeastern Alberta boreal forest decades ago, according to the elders of aboriginal communities who have lived in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo for many years.

One of the goals of oilsands development is to return the land to a condition with equivalent capability to that which existed prior to development. As part of the reclamation and closure planning process for developments, Alberta regulators require companies to leave some areas of undisturbed land as part of their development planning. These areas are often associated with watercourses and waterbodies, and often function as wildlife corridors. Therefore, incorporating such undisturbed areas within project development and closure plans assists in the developers’ efforts to bring developed areas back to equivalent capability after recovery of the oilsands resource.

Days away from retirement, Bruce Friesen has worked in the oilsands industry for decades. He has watched land go through the entire cycle from initially removing the overburden to a fully reclaimed landscape.