A few weeks ago, Neil Young compared the oil sands of northern Alberta to the horrific scene of Hiroshima after it was devastated by a nuclear bomb. While Neil Young may have a heart of gold, with comments like that it's clear that he must have a brain of lead. There is no doubt that oil sands development have a significant impact on the natural landscape and ecology of northern Alberta. However, no natural resource development is completely benign. In fact, even though B.C.'s hydroelectric resource is considered clean because of its emission free nature, the artificial reservoirs they create have a huge geographical footprint. In fact, compared to BC's hydroelectric reservoirs, the oil sands local geographic impact seems pretty minimal.
According to the latest Alberta government figures, the oil sands have impacted, in total, about 80,000 hectares of otherwise undisturbed land. This includes about 56,000 hectares where active oil sands mining is taking place, plus another 20,000 hectares where the land has been cleared in preparation for further operations. (All of the impacted land is supposed to be reclaimed back into its natural state. However, since there are serious doubts as to whether that is possible, I have assumed here that no land will be reclaimed.) That sounds like a large area. But how does it compare to something we are more familiar with in B.C.; the reservoirs created by our hydroelectric power plants?
There are many artificial reservoirs in BC due to hydroelectric generation. They include Ootsa lake, Kinbasket lake and many other smaller ones along the Columbia river watershed. But the largest reservoir by far is Williston lake; it was formed in the Peace River watershed when the WAC Bennett dam was constructed. It is true that prior to the dam being built, there were some natural rivers and lakes under present day Williston lake. However, these would have been quite small compared to the size of modern day Williston lake and it is therefore appropriate to characterise Williston lake as mostly the direct result of the Bennett dam.
The surface area of Williston lake is over 174,000 hectares. In other words, the total geographic footprint of all of Alberta's oil sands operations, 80,000 hectares, is less than half the size of the geographic footprint, (Williston lake), of just one hydro-electric project in BC. Some people might argue that an oil sands surface mining landscape looks much uglier than natural looking Williston lake in BC and I would definitely agree with them. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. From an objective point of view however, artificially created hydro reservoirs as well as oil sands surface mining are both deviations from the landscape and ecology that mother nature intended.
When considering the total environmental impact, including carbon emissions, I think that BC's hydroelectric projects are much less harmful to the environment than the oil sands. However, I also believe that there is a lot of blown out of proportion rhetoric aimed at the oil sands; Neil Young being the latest offender with his comments comparing northern Alberta to Hiroshima. With regard to the specific point of their geographic footprint, the oil sands stack up quite well when compared to some other mega-projects such as BC's hydroelectric dams.
