Tailings ponds hold roughly 1.6 trillion litres of liquid waste and cover roughly 300 square kilometres, or nearly half the size of Edmonton
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A committee to hasten reclamation efforts of oilsands tailings ponds will be chaired by Tany Yao, UCP MLA for Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo, and include Jim Boucher, the former chief of the Fort McKay First Nation.
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Yao said in an interview he plans to review reclamation plans that all oilsands producers are required to file with the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER). The committee has been tasked with studying and proposing policies to allow tailings reclamation to be done as quickly and safely as possible.
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“I’m going to be doing a very thorough and very robust investigation into tailings pond water and how we remediate that,” said Yao. “Water is such a valuable resource and we need to treat it like gold.”
Tailings are leftovers from the extraction process that separates oil from sand and clay. What is left is a slurry of water, sand, clay and residual bitumen leftover from the extraction process.
The Alberta government says oilsands operators have cut the amount of fresh water used per barrel by 23 per cent since 2017. All operators came in below approved volume limits in 2022.
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But for now, the ponds hold roughly 1.6 trillion litres of liquid waste and cover roughly 300 square kilometres, or nearly half the size of Edmonton.
Other organizations have looked into reclaiming tailings ponds in the oilsands. Canada’s Oilsands Innovation Alliance funds tailings management research programs at Carleton University, NAIT and the University of Alberta. The province also funds the Oilsands Tailings Research Facility.
“This is a Groundhog Day response,” said Keith Stewart of Greenpeace to The Canadian Press. “The libraries are full of research that’s already been done. The number of committees that have been struck to avoid actually solving (the problem) is stunning.”
Any solutions proposed by the six-member committee will consider available technology, current policies, impacts to the environment and local communities, economics, infrastructure needs and legal implications.
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“There are responsible ways we can address this and our government wouldn’t be putting this together for just optics. We all want solutions to this,” said Yao.
The six-member committee also includes Mohamed Gamal, engineering research chair and director of the Water Research Centre at the University of Alberta; Andrea Larson, a researcher and former AER employee with oilsands mining experience; and Alan Reid, a retired oilsands executive who has worked with the Pathways Alliance and Cenovus.
The committee also includes Lorne Tayler, Alberta’s former minister of science, research and information technology under the late premier Ralph Klein and a former chair of the Alberta Water Research Institute and Alberta Environmental Monitoring Evaluation and Reporting Agency (AEMERA).
-with files from The Canadian Press
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vmcdermott@postmedia.com
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