The southern edge of Suncor’s southernmost tailings pond, about 10 kilometers from Fort McMurray, Alberta. The Athabasca River can be seen in the background, about two kilometers from the pond
Photograph Louis Helbig, Beautiful Destruction
To the ducks that were looking for shelter from a spring storm back in 2008, it probably looked like a perfectly safe place to ride it out. Instead, it was one of Syncrude’s tailings ponds, and it ended up killing more than 1,600 of them – and transforming the oil sands from an industrial project into an international talking point. That’s why in early 2009 the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board released Directive 074: Tailings Performance Criteria and Requirements for Oil Sands Mining Schemes. At the time, the directive was seen as a major step toward minimizing the public outcry against tailings; oil sands producers were confident in their technologies and agreed to the terms of the directive, and even hardened environmentalists showed hints of optimism. Public figures made bold assertions. On Earth Day in 2010, then-premier Ed Stelmach called on producers to rapidly reduce their tailings volumes, going as far as to suggest they should eliminate those tailings “in a few years.”
“Few people appreciate the complexity of actually developing [these technologies] to full scale.”
– John Sobkowicz, geotechnical engineer at Thurber engineering
But it quickly became clear that wasn’t going to happen, and that even meeting the first set of targets, which asked them to capture 20 per cent of fine tailings (the clay, silt and sand particles mixed with processed water) from their oil sands feed by mid-2010 and 30 per cent by mid-2011, was going to be a challenge. Indeed, many producers missed those targets, and not a single one met a separate set of targets for drying and storing fine tailings. As a result, a policy that was supposed to shield oil sands producers from the spotlight ended up intensifying its glare. In March the AER officially suspended Directive 074 and issued a press release saying it was drafting a new policy under the direction of the Alberta government. In the meantime, many people were left with one question: How did it go so wrong so fast?
To some, Directive 074 was well intended but ineffective, and often set unnecessary objectives for producers. “I think with Directive 074, it was a little naive in the way it was written; the regulator thought it could specify the goalposts, and it did, but in the end I don’t think that was helpful,” says John Sobkowicz, the senior geotechnical engineer at Thurber Engineering and author of various reports on tailings regulation and technology. The policy focused tightly on “fines capture in various deposits,” which, Sobkowicz says, needlessly required companies to track very small deposits of fluid fine tailings (FFT), including the movement of those fines as they passed through processing facilities. Operators also had to meet yearly targets for total fine clay particles captured, rather than working toward the so-called “end state” of tailings ponds.
Companies claimed that some of the conditions were arbitrary and ineffective: The directive set targets for the shear strength of tailings in dedicated disposal areas, which were put in place to speed up the time it takes for tailings to reach a more dewatered, or “trafficable” state (operators were required to reach five kilopascals (kPa) in the first year and 10 kPa after five years). “That was just totally artificial,” Sobkowicz says. In some cases, tailings aren’t trafficable until they reach a shear strength of 100 kPa or higher. Sobkowicz says those short-term targets, as well as the requirement to achieve specific shear strengths under rigid timelines, distracted operators from focusing on quality research and development, and may even have caused some companies to scale up their technologies too quickly. One example is Suncor Energy’s Tailings Reduction Operations, in which mature fine tailings are pumped out of a tailings pond, mixed with a polymer additive, then spread across a “beach,” or drying area, eventually leaving only a layer of partially dewatered fines.
The technology, which Suncor began researching around 2003, showed promise around the time Directive 074 was drafted, but it saw underwhelming results when it moved toward commercialization. The specific composition of the tailings used in the field test turned out to be different from the tailings the company encountered in the commercial phase, which delayed progress. “In my opinion that technology was rushed to full-scale production,” Sobkowicz says.
“When you get those pressures from the public and regulators – and I’m not saying they’re not right to apply those pressures – but when you get those pressures, there’s always a temptation to jump from a small-scale thing in the lab to complete commercial implementation,” Sobkowicz says. Since 2010 the technology, which cost the company $250 million to develop and $1.8 billion to scale up, has allowed Suncor to reclaim one pond and make another one trafficable by using a coke capping technology. A third pond is currently being dried.
Suncor isn’t the only company that’s invested big bucks in new tailings management technologies in recent years. Syncrude invested heavily in a centrifuge facility that rapidly speeds up the separation process but doesn’t necessarily bring tailings to a final state any faster, and comes with a $1.9- billion price tag. Shell Canada is considering a similar technology. Canadian Natural Resources is set to unveil a technology that uses thickeners and cyclones to separate water from non-segregated tailings. Together COSIA members have invested billions on new technologies over the past decade. Time will tell whether it proves to be money well spent or not.
If the scrutiny over their tailings ponds is new, the challenges they pose to oil sands operators are much more familiar. Clay fines in Alberta’s oil sands take a long time to separate from water compared to tailings created in mineral mining, and experts estimate it could take over 100 years for mature fine tailings – tailings that have settled over more than a few years – to completely separate from water. Operators began to realize this problem soon after Alberta’s first commercial oil sands mine came online in the late ’60s. There was a period of collaboration between oil sands producers in the 1990s to find a technological solution to growing tailings volumes, which, after hitting a lull in the 2000s, resumed again under COSIA. Together the companies have made major advancements in their most promising technologies. Consolidated tailings, for example, has been in the works for many years, and could yet see a breakthrough. And in the interim, the volumes of new tailings being created are trending downward at some oil sands mines. Suncor, for example, is looking to lower new tailings volumes and expects to reclaim 2,000 hectares of tailings by the end of 2015.
But there is yet to be a technology that can be applied economically over large volumes and short timelines, leaving some to wonder how much more may need to be invested to reclaim existing – and future – tailings ponds. And critics, like the Pembina Institute’s Erin Flanagan, say that the lack of regulation before the mid-2000s only made the situation worse. That’s why, she says, although the timelines attached to Directive 074 may have seemed unreasonable to some in industry, they were still worth pursuing. “If you take the long-game perspective here, and you want to think about what the reclamation goals are for northeastern Alberta and what the landscape will look like in a century, [Directive 074] was not overly ambitious at all,” Flanagan says. Whether or not they can find a solution to their tailings problem, someone is going to have to clean it up and legally we have to bring it back to its original state. Who’s actually on the hook for those costs?”
That’s a question that the government is in the process of answering. Since the suspension of Directive 074, the Alberta government released its Tailings Management Framework for the Mineable Athabasca Oil Sands, a guide for the provincial regulator that outlines the government’s expectations under the next policy. Flanagan thinks it’s too early to determine whether the next round of legislation will be effective but says the new framework shows promise due to its inclusion of long-term targets, including loose targets for reclaiming legacy ponds. “I think it’s encouraging in some ways in that it’s more holistic, but they really haven’t provided much meat on the bone – they’ve left that to the regulator,” she says. “The AER is really going to make or break whether this policy is successful.”
For its part, the AER received the framework in March 2015 and expects to have the first draft in the fall according to spokesperson Cara Tobin. “The timeline is certainly ambitious. But it’s the evolution of the regulation of tailings,” she says. “We had Directive 074 from a number of years ago, and now we have more specific direction from government on how they want to see us regulate tailings.” COSIA, meanwhile, published a report in February that summarized industry’s hopes and expectations for the next draft of regulation, which, like the government’s new framework, concentrates on final results instead of yearly targets. “I’m hopeful that we’re heading in the right direction,” says Sobkowicz, who helped write the report. But developing a technology that can be scaled up from the laboratory and applied economically still seems far off, and developing new technologies is time-consuming. “Few people appreciate the complexity of actually developing [these technologies] to full scale,” he says. But for now, at least, the oil sands sector’s image depends on whether the public is willing to be patient.
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