6 ms·

Air pollution over Alberta oil sands up to 6,300% higher than reported

252 points by voisin 3y ago

CharlesW 3y ago
If you want to get a feel for what it's like for the people who work those fields, I can highly recommend Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, an Eisner Award and Harvey Award-winning graphic novel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducks:_Two_Years_in_the_Oil_Sands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducks:_Two_Years_in_the_Oil_Sa...
- mc3301 3y ago
  It is, in fact, an eerily accurate representation of that time and place. I, too, recommend it.
- bouvin 3y ago
  Thirded – it is a stunning, haunting work. The author, Kate Beaton, was previously probably best known for her (also award winning) 'Hark! A Vagrant' web comic [1,2]. [1] http://www.harkavagrant.com http://www.harkavagrant.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hark!_A_Vagrant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hark!_A_Vagrant
14 3y ago
The oil sands are a disaster and will be left for future generations to deal with. They have yet to clean up any of it but will point to one are they cleaned but in reality they did not clean it. They took all the sludge and moved it to another location then buried the area in a thin layer of new soil and planted some grass and said see we can clean it up. But in reality all the waste was just moved elsewhere for another generation to deal with. Furthermore they have countless abandoned wells that need cleanup and that will never happen. The second oil becomes uneconomical these companies will bankrupt and disappear for ever leaving the mess for future generations. Just a travesty.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >The oil sands are a disaster and will be left for future generations to deal with. They have yet to clean up any of it but will point to one are they cleaned but in reality they did not clean it. They took all the sludge and moved it to another location then buried the area in a thin layer of new soil and planted some grass and said see we can clean it up. Yes, we have to dig things out of the ground to sustain our society. Oil, metals, minerals. It's not clean. We do what we can. You can insert the "we should improve society" somewhat meme all you want, but it doesn't hide that fact that the people who complain the most are just as likely to reap the rewards of all the things they hate.
  - elevaet 3y ago
    The thing is the tar sands are a very high ratio or harm:benefit that we would be better off without exploiting. It's a lot like coal - we're at the point where its abundantly clear we need to get off coal for the health of the planet, and luckily many jurisdictions are doing so. Yes, we could "reap rewards" of coal, and if I happened to be living in an area that generated its power from coal I would be reaping this reward, but I would be valid in saying that we need to get off coal and switch to less polluting means of producing energy. Bitumen is analogous. We can do better.
throwayzzz 3y ago
[dead]
voisin 3y ago
Worth reading given its focus on Fort McMurray, the key city in the oil sands: “Fire Weather - A True Story from a Hotter World” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61966364 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61966364
- twoWhlsGud 3y ago
  Agree - nice interview with him on the NYT book review podcast https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/books/review/how-to-tell-the-story-of-a-giant-wildfire.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/books/review/how-to-tell-... The fact that they managed to get everyone out of the path of the fire successfully impressed me given the circumstances
nneonneo 3y ago
The actual paper with the findings and methodology: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj6233 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj6233 The paper is saying that the numbers reported by industry are made on the basis of a few pollutant species, but looking at a much wider set of potential pollutants yields this "6300%" figure.
cryptos 3y ago
Why do people use percent for such big factors? To make the headline more impressive?
- antoniojtorres 3y ago
  Is it not impressive without the percentage? How about 63 times?
  - warvariuc 3y ago
    Shouldn't it be 64 times? x + x * 6300% == 64 * x
    - antoniojtorres 3y ago
      that’s even more impressive
- hnbad 3y ago
  Feels like the opposite to me. "6,300%" looks weird as we're expecting to see percentages used for numbers much smaller than that. "63 times more" would prompt a visceral reaction. "6,300%" at first looks like a typo.
briga 3y ago
Anecdotally I've heard the people living downwind of the big oilsands developments suffer a wide range of health problems from the toxic air quality. It's no secret that these developments are not good for human or animal health, although the big oil companies don't advertise it. I guess the upshot is that to even get to Fort McMurray you need to drive for hours through pure wilderness--no towns, no farms, nothing but endless forest. It's far out of the way of where most people would choose to live (were it not for high-paying oil jobs). But even in the south of the province it feels like the air quality has been deteriorating. We seem to get air pollution warnings are long more than I ever remember growing up.
- bawolff 3y ago
  I mean, i would assume the constant forest fires are still dominant factor in air quality in places where people actually live.
  - zug_zug 3y ago
    I wouldn’t just assume that. Yes fire smoke isn’t good, but different types of smoke can be exponentially worse depending on the chemicals of what’s burning. Just look at all the firefighters who got permanent lung damage for example
alentred 3y ago
On a side note, > between 1,900 per cent and 6,300 per cent higher than industry has reported Maybe that's just me, but I find it harder to think in percentages above 200%. I mean, the math is easy, but it is less intuitive. I feel that: "20 to 64 times of what industry has reported" would be easier to grasp and probably also less ambiguous.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  With a pure mathematical understanding yes, but per cent communicates the obscenity better, in this case. "So, I was 20% over the speed limit, and I got a huge fine." "Oil producers were 6000% over the pollution limit and they got a huge profit."
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Speed limit is kinda good counter example. Like getting fine for going 12 in 10 km/h zone sound completely wrong... But going 144 in 120 motorway, yeah anyone complaining is stupid...
itsoktocry 3y ago
I'm Canadian. Went to school in Edmonton. Visited the oil sands a few times. It's amazing, in both a "good" and "bad" sense. But the climate change discourse is so poisoned, and scientific research so politicized, I find this hard to believe. 63 times? It's a headline meant to grab attention. It's simply not possible this is the case without anyone ever noticing prior, or massive liability issues. Blame the companies, of course. But how could the government be so inept to allow it? It's extraordinary. To the point I can't even be bothered to look at the paper, since I have to assume they are measuring something completely different.
- obsoletehippo 3y ago
  So your faith in the competence of government oversight is what primarily prevents you from believing this piece of research is correct? That's an unusual stance for HN. :-) Both the companies and the government obviously have a financial/economic interest in not finding this out, if it's true. I find it pretty easy to believe, and I am a fairly pro-govt lefty type.
  - ActionHank 3y ago
    Even the government (federal) didn't trust these numbers. Provincial government is heavily biased towards supporting anything related to fossil fuels and their political leadership deny climate change as often as possible.
    - itsoktocry 3y ago
      >Provincial government is heavily biased towards supporting anything related to fossil fuels and their political leadership deny climate change as often as possible. Fighting against stupid climate change policies isn't "denying climate change". Policies like, I don't know, clamping down on our oil extraction and pipelines locally, and instead buying the resources from adversarial countries.
      - eldaisfish 3y ago
osigurdson 3y ago
6300% or 65%? The headline states the former while the article (and linked study) state 65%.
- Zitrax 3y ago
  Seem to be different studies and measurements - so both.
  - osigurdson 3y ago
    I didn't see any links to the second study.
- sp332 3y ago
  The 65% number was from a study last April. The higher number is more recent.
creativeSlumber 3y ago
> between 1,900 per cent and 6,300 per cent higher than industry has reported. Why are they relying on the industry to self report these?
- markerz 3y ago
  Seems more like the standard used to measure emissions is inadequate. > Past monitoring has failed to capture the full scope of organic carbon pollution because it wasn’t looking at a diverse enough range of molecular sizes often associated with heavy oil and bitumen deposits. Such deposits are expected to account for 40 per cent of global oil production by 2040, the study found.
- astrodust 3y ago
  Because Alberta, which translated into American is "Texas".
- sandworm101 3y ago
  Alberta politics today is like Texas in the 1990s. Freedom. Hatred of the national government. Denialism (climate/vaccinations/gravity etc). Pickup trucks. Guns. Oil. If someone says don't do something, a large portion of Albertans will do it out of spite. The only place I've every even heard of rolling coal in Canada was in northern Alberta, home of the oil sands. Typical example: in BC people turn on their head/taillights in bad weather. In Alberta, heck no. Lights don't come on until legally mandated at sunset. Freedom.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Pardon my ignorance, but isn't that also Texas now?
    - lukasm 3y ago
      Taxes is the most green state
    - osigurdson 3y ago
jseutter 3y ago
For context, Alberta oil sands have an energy ratio of about 4 to 1, meaning it takes one barrel of oil to produce 4 barrels. The world average is about 17 to 1 with your typical Saudi oil about 40:1. It's difficult to describe what this stuff is like if you haven't seen it. It's essentially a stiff tar that soaked into sand. One of the techniques for refining it (not sure if still used) consisted of importing good oil from the US to dilute it up to a minimum standard so it can be sold. A current technique like mentioned in the article is to heat up the formation with steam until it gets hot enough so that it starts to flow. They use natural gas to heat the steam, so it's essentially a scheme to turn natural gas into oil, but with pollution added to the mix. What works for monitoring in other basins is obviously insufficient for the oil sands, so it's good to see the federal government funding these sorts of studies. It will likely lead to better monitoring and reporting regulations, but the Alberta government will likely scream that a Trudeau is trying to f** us over once again. The last time in the 80s was plain protectionism, while this is protectionism for a much better reason. I love my province, but man, are we stupid sometimes. The oil produced mostly gets shipped to the US, where we sell it at a discount because it's crappy quality. This in turns helps the US pollute more but save dollars in the process. Oil sands oil makes up about 14% of US oil consumption. If I was dictator of Alberta, I wouldn't do anything to stop production, I would just make a law that any production energy has to come from renewable, non-carbon sources. It would generate a frenzy of research and development that hasn't been seen since the industrial revolution as people pant and salivate at all that money sitting in the ground. :) I eventually decided I wouldn't work for oil companies any longer. If they want to do it, they'll have to do it without me. It has led me down a fun career path of working for companies I only dreamed about working for when I was in school. Energy statistics by a partisan group, so numbers might be biased: https://sustainablesociety.com/research-material/oil-sands/ https://sustainablesociety.com/research-material/oil-sands/ Energy stats worldwide: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0144141 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- pstuart 3y ago
  Maybe there's a middle ground -- is the production subsidized? If so, drop the subsidies and let the market decide. I like your idea better, but perhaps a softer touch might get more traction?

252 points by voisin 3y ago

If you want to get a feel for what it's like for the people who work those fields, I can highly recommend Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, an Eisner Award and Harvey Award-winning graphic novel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducks:_Two_Years_in_the_Oil_Sands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducks:_Two_Years_in_the_Oil_Sa...

mc3301 3y ago
It is, in fact, an eerily accurate representation of that time and place. I, too, recommend it.
bouvin 3y ago
Thirded – it is a stunning, haunting work. The author, Kate Beaton, was previously probably best known for her (also award winning) 'Hark! A Vagrant' web comic [1,2]. [1] http://www.harkavagrant.com http://www.harkavagrant.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hark!_A_Vagrant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hark!_A_Vagrant

14 3y ago

The oil sands are a disaster and will be left for future generations to deal with. They have yet to clean up any of it but will point to one are they cleaned but in reality they did not clean it. They took all the sludge and moved it to another location then buried the area in a thin layer of new soil and planted some grass and said see we can clean it up. But in reality all the waste was just moved elsewhere for another generation to deal with. Furthermore they have countless abandoned wells that need cleanup and that will never happen. The second oil becomes uneconomical these companies will bankrupt and disappear for ever leaving the mess for future generations. Just a travesty.

itsoktocry 3y ago
>The oil sands are a disaster and will be left for future generations to deal with. They have yet to clean up any of it but will point to one are they cleaned but in reality they did not clean it. They took all the sludge and moved it to another location then buried the area in a thin layer of new soil and planted some grass and said see we can clean it up. Yes, we have to dig things out of the ground to sustain our society. Oil, metals, minerals. It's not clean. We do what we can. You can insert the "we should improve society" somewhat meme all you want, but it doesn't hide that fact that the people who complain the most are just as likely to reap the rewards of all the things they hate.
- elevaet 3y ago
  The thing is the tar sands are a very high ratio or harm:benefit that we would be better off without exploiting. It's a lot like coal - we're at the point where its abundantly clear we need to get off coal for the health of the planet, and luckily many jurisdictions are doing so. Yes, we could "reap rewards" of coal, and if I happened to be living in an area that generated its power from coal I would be reaping this reward, but I would be valid in saying that we need to get off coal and switch to less polluting means of producing energy. Bitumen is analogous. We can do better.

throwayzzz 3y ago

[dead]

voisin 3y ago

Worth reading given its focus on Fort McMurray, the key city in the oil sands: “Fire Weather - A True Story from a Hotter World” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61966364 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61966364

twoWhlsGud 3y ago
Agree - nice interview with him on the NYT book review podcast https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/books/review/how-to-tell-the-story-of-a-giant-wildfire.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/books/review/how-to-tell-... The fact that they managed to get everyone out of the path of the fire successfully impressed me given the circumstances

nneonneo 3y ago

The actual paper with the findings and methodology: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj6233 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj6233 The paper is saying that the numbers reported by industry are made on the basis of a few pollutant species, but looking at a much wider set of potential pollutants yields this "6300%" figure.

cryptos 3y ago

Why do people use percent for such big factors? To make the headline more impressive?

antoniojtorres 3y ago
Is it not impressive without the percentage? How about 63 times?
- warvariuc 3y ago
  Shouldn't it be 64 times? x + x * 6300% == 64 * x
  - antoniojtorres 3y ago
    that’s even more impressive
hnbad 3y ago
Feels like the opposite to me. "6,300%" looks weird as we're expecting to see percentages used for numbers much smaller than that. "63 times more" would prompt a visceral reaction. "6,300%" at first looks like a typo.

briga 3y ago

Anecdotally I've heard the people living downwind of the big oilsands developments suffer a wide range of health problems from the toxic air quality. It's no secret that these developments are not good for human or animal health, although the big oil companies don't advertise it. I guess the upshot is that to even get to Fort McMurray you need to drive for hours through pure wilderness--no towns, no farms, nothing but endless forest. It's far out of the way of where most people would choose to live (were it not for high-paying oil jobs). But even in the south of the province it feels like the air quality has been deteriorating. We seem to get air pollution warnings are long more than I ever remember growing up.

bawolff 3y ago
I mean, i would assume the constant forest fires are still dominant factor in air quality in places where people actually live.
- zug_zug 3y ago
  I wouldn’t just assume that. Yes fire smoke isn’t good, but different types of smoke can be exponentially worse depending on the chemicals of what’s burning. Just look at all the firefighters who got permanent lung damage for example

alentred 3y ago

On a side note, > between 1,900 per cent and 6,300 per cent higher than industry has reported Maybe that's just me, but I find it harder to think in percentages above 200%. I mean, the math is easy, but it is less intuitive. I feel that: "20 to 64 times of what industry has reported" would be easier to grasp and probably also less ambiguous.

actionfromafar 3y ago
With a pure mathematical understanding yes, but per cent communicates the obscenity better, in this case. "So, I was 20% over the speed limit, and I got a huge fine." "Oil producers were 6000% over the pollution limit and they got a huge profit."
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Speed limit is kinda good counter example. Like getting fine for going 12 in 10 km/h zone sound completely wrong... But going 144 in 120 motorway, yeah anyone complaining is stupid...

itsoktocry 3y ago

I'm Canadian. Went to school in Edmonton. Visited the oil sands a few times. It's amazing, in both a "good" and "bad" sense. But the climate change discourse is so poisoned, and scientific research so politicized, I find this hard to believe. 63 times? It's a headline meant to grab attention. It's simply not possible this is the case without anyone ever noticing prior, or massive liability issues. Blame the companies, of course. But how could the government be so inept to allow it? It's extraordinary. To the point I can't even be bothered to look at the paper, since I have to assume they are measuring something completely different.

obsoletehippo 3y ago
So your faith in the competence of government oversight is what primarily prevents you from believing this piece of research is correct? That's an unusual stance for HN. :-) Both the companies and the government obviously have a financial/economic interest in not finding this out, if it's true. I find it pretty easy to believe, and I am a fairly pro-govt lefty type.
- ActionHank 3y ago
  Even the government (federal) didn't trust these numbers. Provincial government is heavily biased towards supporting anything related to fossil fuels and their political leadership deny climate change as often as possible.
  - itsoktocry 3y ago
    >Provincial government is heavily biased towards supporting anything related to fossil fuels and their political leadership deny climate change as often as possible. Fighting against stupid climate change policies isn't "denying climate change". Policies like, I don't know, clamping down on our oil extraction and pipelines locally, and instead buying the resources from adversarial countries.
    - eldaisfish 3y ago

osigurdson 3y ago

6300% or 65%? The headline states the former while the article (and linked study) state 65%.

Zitrax 3y ago
Seem to be different studies and measurements - so both.
- osigurdson 3y ago
  I didn't see any links to the second study.
sp332 3y ago
The 65% number was from a study last April. The higher number is more recent.

creativeSlumber 3y ago

> between 1,900 per cent and 6,300 per cent higher than industry has reported. Why are they relying on the industry to self report these?

markerz 3y ago
Seems more like the standard used to measure emissions is inadequate. > Past monitoring has failed to capture the full scope of organic carbon pollution because it wasn’t looking at a diverse enough range of molecular sizes often associated with heavy oil and bitumen deposits. Such deposits are expected to account for 40 per cent of global oil production by 2040, the study found.
astrodust 3y ago
Because Alberta, which translated into American is "Texas".
sandworm101 3y ago
Alberta politics today is like Texas in the 1990s. Freedom. Hatred of the national government. Denialism (climate/vaccinations/gravity etc). Pickup trucks. Guns. Oil. If someone says don't do something, a large portion of Albertans will do it out of spite. The only place I've every even heard of rolling coal in Canada was in northern Alberta, home of the oil sands. Typical example: in BC people turn on their head/taillights in bad weather. In Alberta, heck no. Lights don't come on until legally mandated at sunset. Freedom.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Pardon my ignorance, but isn't that also Texas now?
  - lukasm 3y ago
    Taxes is the most green state
  - osigurdson 3y ago

jseutter 3y ago

For context, Alberta oil sands have an energy ratio of about 4 to 1, meaning it takes one barrel of oil to produce 4 barrels. The world average is about 17 to 1 with your typical Saudi oil about 40:1. It's difficult to describe what this stuff is like if you haven't seen it. It's essentially a stiff tar that soaked into sand. One of the techniques for refining it (not sure if still used) consisted of importing good oil from the US to dilute it up to a minimum standard so it can be sold. A current technique like mentioned in the article is to heat up the formation with steam until it gets hot enough so that it starts to flow. They use natural gas to heat the steam, so it's essentially a scheme to turn natural gas into oil, but with pollution added to the mix. What works for monitoring in other basins is obviously insufficient for the oil sands, so it's good to see the federal government funding these sorts of studies. It will likely lead to better monitoring and reporting regulations, but the Alberta government will likely scream that a Trudeau is trying to f** us over once again. The last time in the 80s was plain protectionism, while this is protectionism for a much better reason. I love my province, but man, are we stupid sometimes. The oil produced mostly gets shipped to the US, where we sell it at a discount because it's crappy quality. This in turns helps the US pollute more but save dollars in the process. Oil sands oil makes up about 14% of US oil consumption. If I was dictator of Alberta, I wouldn't do anything to stop production, I would just make a law that any production energy has to come from renewable, non-carbon sources. It would generate a frenzy of research and development that hasn't been seen since the industrial revolution as people pant and salivate at all that money sitting in the ground. :) I eventually decided I wouldn't work for oil companies any longer. If they want to do it, they'll have to do it without me. It has led me down a fun career path of working for companies I only dreamed about working for when I was in school. Energy statistics by a partisan group, so numbers might be biased: https://sustainablesociety.com/research-material/oil-sands/ https://sustainablesociety.com/research-material/oil-sands/ Energy stats worldwide: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0144141 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

pstuart 3y ago
Maybe there's a middle ground -- is the production subsidized? If so, drop the subsidies and let the market decide. I like your idea better, but perhaps a softer touch might get more traction?