Oil sands report calls for increased focus on environment
February 12, 2009 CALGARY -- Oil sands developments must make a greater effort to mitigate the broader impacts of their projects, the Alberta government said in a report issued Thursday morning that is short on specifics and long on vaguely-defined goals.
The report does not call for a moratorium on oil sands development, nor does it lay out steps for staggered development that community leaders have called for as a way to reduce the crush of development Alberta has faced in recent years.
It does call for an increased focus on managing the cumulative affects on the environment and communities, and for the setting of regional targets and thresholds for air, water, land and biodiversity.
It also calls for a more comprehensive community approach to co-ordinating oil sands planning, cutting industry's environmental footprint and building long-term community capacity.
Among the other goals:
-invest in carbon capture and storage
-establish a report-card system for individual companies on their social, economic and environmental performance
-diversify and market Alberta oil-sands products abroad
-speed up transportation and utility development plans for both oil sands operations and bitumen upgraders
-work together with Ottawa to on consultation for projects “that may adversely impact the constitutionally protected rights of Aboriginal people.”
-establish ground-truthing data with the Metis to determine the impact of oil sands projects on their lands
-create incentives for “technology acquisition, development, and implementation related to oil sands extraction and processing”
-require information sharing between research agencies and the provincial government, in hopes of better publicizing publicly-funded science
-grow a market for Alberta bitumen using bitumen “royalty-in-kind” transactions, and create a government-led organization to manage those transactions.
But while the report is filled with objectives, it contains little in the way of actual work plans. The Alberta government says an “overarching implementation plan” is still being worked on.
In 2007, a committee struck by the Alberta government released a 66-page document that warned changes to oil sands development needed to be made, and encouraged development of new technology.
But the committee, which was made up of industry, provincial and municipal civil servants, aboriginal representatives, environmentalists failed to agree on a broad swath of issues. Among the disagreements was whether to cap greenhouse gas emissions, whether to declare a temporary moratorium on development, whether to limit development by freezing water licences or constraining the amount of land available for oil sands, and whether to increase the government's take of oil sands profits.
At the time, Premier Ed Stelmach said he would prefer to let the market self-regulate, rather than “touching the brake” on development.
Since then, the recent credit crunch and dramatic slide in commodity prices has brought most new oil sands development to a screeching halt.
In the past six months, dozens of companies have halted, suspended or outright cancelled $230-billion in planned capital spending, according to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, which calculated that Alberta could now produce half as much oil by 2015 as expected a year ago, at the height of the boom.
© 2009 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc.
