Giant Tar Sands Lakes for Athabasca

Big Oil has figured out it's way too expensive to fill in their bitumen mines with soil and far, far cheaper to simply transform them into lakes.

Here's the kicker.   Big Oil says we'll have to wait for several generations to find out whether these lakes turn into pristine ponds or toxic pits.   They call it an industrial experiment.

It may take a century to find out what is left around Fort McMurray. Because the lakes, 30 of them, will be built by Canada’s oil sands industry. When the companies mining heavy crude from northeastern Alberta finish their work, they intend to pump water into old mine pits, some with toxic effluent at their bottoms, before leaving the area to biological processes to restore it to health.

If those plans go according to form, oil sands miners will leave behind broad stretches of new shore perched beside waters clean enough for fish and people. Success on this front would vindicate industry pledges to limit the mark it leaves on an area now home to sprawling open-pit mines.

But the coming lake district also highlights the scale of the ecological gamble under way in the province. The 30 bodies of water will be what are known as end pit lakes, left behind because it’s less costly to fill a mine with water than dirt. Their size and scale are laid out in a new document produced by Alberta’s industry-funded Cumulative Environmental Management Association.

“This is a total crapshoot, in the sense that no one has ever done this before. But really, what are your options?” said one person familiar with the report, which will be released this week.

Perhaps the only certainty is that the lake district will cover substantial ground. The exact size is subject to changing mining plans – including some from projects not yet built – but it seems likely they will take up, in aggregate, more than 100 square kilometres as part of a series of artificial watersheds spreading over 2,500 square kilometres. By comparison, Toronto occupies 630 square kilometres.

The lakes are a project that will engage several generations. Each stands to take a century of work to plan, mine out and establish into a functioning ecological feature. From the moment workers end mining and begin filling the lakes, it could take fully 40 years before governments begin certifying them as environmentally sustainable, the 436-page CEMA report estimates.

Now imagine if you could rob a bank and the tellers agreed to give you a hundred year head start before they called the cops.   And remember, these are the same companies that, until very recently, ran TV ads pledging to restore these pits to pristine condition, as good or better than they found them.