Goal of oil sands monitoring, annual report 2012 to 2013
Achieving the overall goal: understanding environmental and cumulative effects
Understanding long-term environmental effects
In order to understand long-term environmental effects, including cumulative effects of oil sands development, monitoring should provide answers to specific ecologically relevant scientific questions. In answering these questions, information becomes integrated, and a picture of the environmental effects of oil sands development begins to emerge. The three-year Implementation Plan is just a beginning, and assembling, evaluating and reporting trends may take some time, particularly where trends and impacts may be subtle.
The Implementation Plan's scientific design addresses the following specific questions, which are key to understanding regional effects.
- What are the sources and types of substances being released?
- How are these substances being distributed though air, water, and land?
- What are the spatial and temporal trends in these substances?
The primary substances of concern for the Implementation Plan in the oil sands region include: acidifying compounds (NOX, SOX); and substances related to the extraction and combustion of bitumen including monocyclic aromatics (BTEX - benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes), polycyclic aromatic compounds, naphthenic acids, metals and particulate matter. The quantity of these substances can be estimated from industry emissions reports of their operations (as required under regulations), direct measurements in air, water, groundwater, snow, sediments, soils, and organisms, and from indirect measurements by satellite observations.
Understanding the concentration, exposure and impact of these substances is a scientific challenge because emissions can vary over time. Also, the substances can exist naturally in the environment, may be transformed into other substances once emitted, may enter or leave the region, or may accumulate locally. Integrating and validating the information collected to assess total emissions is very important to ensure the most complete picture of environmental effects possible.
- How are these substances being transported and transformed?
- What happens to these substances in the environment?
Emitted substances can be transported through the environment via a number of means and, once deposited, may be remobilized through natural erosion or human-induced changes to the landscape. In addition, substances can be transformed through chemical reactions or biological activity in the atmosphere, water and/or soil. The Implementation Plan identifies monitoring activities that quantify these transport and transformation mechanisms. This allows scientists to provide an overall accounting of the environmental fate of emitted substances.
- To what extent do these substances affect biological communities?
It is possible that at certain concentrations and exposures, substances may impair the biological functioning of an ecosystem through impacts on aquatic and terrestrial plants, fish, amphibians, mammals and/or birds. Monitoring and supporting research activities identified in the Implementation Plan are designed to evaluate biological impacts at local and regional scales and at different levels in the aquatic and terrestrial food webs. Forensic investigations into the cause of these impacts are guided through the use of indicators of biological impairment. Using a range of indicators, biological communities and species will be sampled regularly to identify any biological, ecological and toxicological effects.
- To what extent does habitat disturbance impact biodiversity?
Oil sands development physically disturbs habitat (e.g., forests and wetlands), which can directly impact dependent biodiversity. Monitoring activities will survey a broad variety of mammals, birds, amphibians, invertebrates, and vascular and non-vascular plants and lichens at hundreds of sites with a five-year rotational cycle. Changes to human footprint and habitats caused by disturbance will also be assessed. In addition, there will be complementary surveys for rare, at risk and harvested species to improve the ability to detect trends and monitor the impacts of habitat disturbance. This information will provide an improved understanding of the status and trend of species in the oil sands region and indicate the cumulative and individual effects of development on biodiversity, now and into the future.
Complementing and enhancing regulatory monitoring
Industry is required by provincial and federal regulations to monitor source emissions or other environmental impacts of their operations to demonstrate that their facilities operate within predefined performance objectives. While not part of the Implementation Plan, industry continues to be responsible for all costs involved in monitoring their facility operations to ensure they remain compliant with their regulatory requirements.
Industry has also been responsible for assessing and evaluating the trends and levels of environmental change at the longer-term, regional scale, and this responsibility continues. Prior to the Implementation Plan, regional ambient monitoring approval conditions required individual industry operators to participate in independent monitoring organizations such as the Wood Buffalo Environmental Association (WBEA) or the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI). Under the Implementation Plan, industry will fund the Implementation Plan to conduct regional ambient monitoring.
The enhanced monitoring of the Implementation Plan will help reveal any environmental or cumulative impacts resulting from long-term exposure to substances of concern and from the existence of multiple environmental stresses (substances of concern, nutrients in water, changing climatic conditions, etc.) due to oil sands development. Regional and facility performance monitoring activities are complementary, and exchange of information between the two types of monitoring can assist in the evaluation of potential cumulative impacts of the industry on the environment.