Who’s Angling to Store Oilsands Toxic Waste Underground?

For decades, successive conservative governments in Alberta have promised that technology will address the massive environmental threat posed by toxic oilsands mine wastewater stored in tailings ponds near Fort McMurray, now so large they are more than twice the size of Vancouver.

On June 12, Alberta’s Environment Ministry released a report by its government-appointed Oilsands Mine Water Steering Committee. One of the committee’s five major policy recommendations was to consider allowing companies to inject untreated wastewater deep underground, “once all other options have been fully explored.”

This recommendation would have come as no surprise to Calgary-based Aqua Solutions Inc. The oilsands infrastructure company wants to use its deep-well injection technology to store billions of litres of mine wastewater underground.

Nor would it surprise environmentalists, academics and others who have long complained about the intertwined, conflict-laden relationship between the oilsands industry and the Alberta government.

As its website states, Aqua was invited to participate in the committee, whose recommendation to allow wastewater injection could directly benefit the privately held company.

It appears Aqua participated in the committee’s work even as provincial lobbyist registry records show it lobbied the premier’s office, Alberta Energy and Minerals, Alberta Indigenous Relations, individual MLAs and the Alberta Energy Regulator, or AER.

“Aqua Solutions believes our work on deep-well disposal is complementary to work industry has been pursuing toward reclamation of the tailings ponds,” the company said in a statement posted on its website shortly after the committee released its report.

“We welcome the opportunity to collaborate with industry on the recommendations from the Water Steering Committee.”

The AER will decide if Aqua is allowed to proceed with its wastewater injection project. Oil and gas industry lobbying of the AER is common in Alberta. The AER is supposed to be arm’s-length, but critics have alleged it has been captured by the oil industry and it accedes to directives from Alberta’s United Conservative Party government. Its regulatory failings have been well documented for decades.

Absent from Aqua’s lobbying registry list was Alberta Environment.

Provincial records show Garrison Strategy registered to lobby for Aqua on Feb. 11. A partner in Garrison is Cole Schulz, the husband of Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz, although Cole Schulz is not listed as a lobbyist on the file. There has been a previous allegation of conflict of interest involving the Schulzes.

The environment minister’s press secretary did not respond to a query from The Tyee about whether Aqua had made any representations to the minister or the ministry about its wastewater injection proposal.

A tie to a controversial driller in Namibia

Diana McQueen, a former Alberta minister of environment and of energy, is on Aqua’s board of directors. She is also board chair of another Calgary company, Reconnaissance Energy Africa Ltd., or ReconAfrica, and was directly involved in the company’s operations in southern Africa.

Neither Aqua nor ReconAfrica responded to requests for comment or an interview with McQueen.

ReconAfrica has drawn criticism for its environmental track record while drilling what have so far been exploratory dry holes in the watershed of the Okavango Delta in Namibia.

Spread over five African countries, the delta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the world’s largest protected international wildlife reserve and is home to many threatened species. More than a million people depend on water from the delta’s watershed.

National Geographic and Rolling Stone have published investigations of ReconAfrica’s environmental and stock promotion record related to the Okavango project.

In Canada, the Globe and Mail has reported that the RCMP is investigating ReconAfrica for “alleged offences under a Canadian law prohibiting the corruption of foreign public officials, as well as possible securities fraud. The police have made no formal allegation of wrongdoing against ReconAfrica, and the investigation could conclude that no charges are warranted.”

The RCMP reneged on a promised response to a query from The Tyee about whether the investigation is ongoing.

On April 9, 2024, the international human rights program at the University of Toronto faculty of law filed a complaint about ReconAfrica to the Office of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise. That office reviews and tries to resolve complaints about possible human rights abuses by Canadian companies operating outside Canada in the garment, mining and oil and gas sectors.

The 170-page University of Toronto complaint alleges ReconAfrica’s oil and gas activities breached the human rights of people in the area. A spokesperson for the law faculty’s international human rights program said the federal ombudsperson’s office has yet to complete its initial review of the complaint to determine if the office will conduct an investigation.

Also in April 2024, ReconAfrica agreed to pay US$10.8 million to settle two class-action lawsuits brought by investors in the United States and in Canada and Germany related to allegations of misleading statements about the Okavango project.

Claims that aquifers weren’t protected

The connection between Aqua and ReconAfrica should raise red flags for Albertans, said Rob Parker, a Canadian who until 2021 lived in Namibia for 17 years. In an interview from his home in rural Nova Scotia, Parker said he became an environmentalist and human rights activist after witnessing ReconAfrica’s treatment of Namibians and their environment.

Parker said that, for example, as has been reported, ReconAfrica stored drilling wastewater, potentially polluted with toxic compounds, in unlined ponds.

As National Geographic reported, without a protective liner toxic water can seep into the soil and potentially into aquifers and into the Okavango Delta, the lifeblood of myriad animals and humans.

Recon said the ponds are lined with bentonite clay, which it claimed is effective and more expensive than conventional liners. An environmental engineering professor told Rolling Stone that companies try to get away with using these sorts of pits because it is cheaper, but “clay won’t stop the leakage of many types of toxic compounds into underlying aquifers.”

The oilsands tailings ponds in Alberta are also unlined and for years have leaked chemicals into shallow and deep groundwater connected to the Athabasca River and all other rivers and lakes in the area.

ReconAfrica responded to the initial National Geographic article by calling it a false and defamatory “hit piece.” The company did not sue the magazine or Rolling Stone.

ReconAfrica recently announced it has raised $19 million to continue exploratory drilling in the Okavango region.

“The company,” Parker said, “has acted in such a way in Namibia that it should disqualify anyone associated with Recon from participating in anything that is even remotely connected to the public interest.”

‘Grasping at straws’

Mandy Olsgard is a former senior toxicologist with the Alberta Energy Regulator. She now works as an independent consultant, mostly for Indigenous nations near the oilsands but also for groups concerned about coal mining in the Rocky Mountains of southern Alberta.

This recent government tailings water report is not the first. Olsgard resigned from a provincial oilsands mine water science team in January 2023. She felt it was biased because the Alberta government had final say over how the study was designed and what information would be released.

Olsgard concedes the government did release detailed information. But Indigenous community concerns were not addressed in the more than 3,000-page report.

It is unclear to Olsgard why a second committee was needed after five years of previous work. She said it appears the government was intent on continuing to commission reports until it got the answer it wanted.

She also served on the federal Crown-Indigenous working group on mine wastewater, for which she also helped design the tailings water treatment technology study. On a scale of recommendations from one — most recommended — to 10, the working group placed injection of untreated wastewater at six.

“I believe that was a consensus-based, robust scientific process and I would put more weight on that study than any other study from the province or a private company,” she said.

Aqua hiring a lobbying firm with a partner who is the husband of the environment minister is “completely incestuous,” she said, despite the fact that Alberta Environment wasn’t listed as a lobbying target.

“He [Cole Schulz] could just speak to her at the dinner table, and that is a big concern for scientists who are spending their entire careers, like me, independently conducting studies to inform our positions.”

At the AER, Olsgard helped develop and publish the risk assessment process that describes how to evaluate and determine whether there are risks of contaminating groundwater or surface water from deep geological activities.

The process was designed for solvent injection to extract oilsands from deep reservoirs. But she said the methods could be applied to any activity, including deep disposal of oilsands mine water.

Olsgard said companies told the AER back then that these deep aquifers — geologically old, highly salty oceans — “are not connected to surface water and they stay really, really deep.

“But that was not the reality,” she said. There are fractures in the bedrock, and water moves through them and in some cases surfaces in the Athabasca River.

“It is a perfect example of why you need to do detailed geotechnical studies and risk analyses to understand if these aquifers that they want to inject oilsands mine water into are actually segregated from any water bodies,” she said. “Or are there pathways in which mine water could escape to the surface?”

The most recent report from the government’s water steering committee claims the underground disposal of tailings is safe and wouldn’t contaminate drinking water sources because the wastewater would be trapped beneath many layers of impermeable rock.

“When I read those recommendations from this most recent steering committee, it doesn't look to me like any studies have been done,” Olsgard said.

“The presentations are not online. There is not a single technical document. It seems like it is biased to a cheap solution to an expensive problem, and it is hypothetical.”

Right now, she said, the only real solution is to clean the tailings water with active water treatment, like the process used by municipalities, before it could be released from an oilsands lease.

“Because people drink the water, it is not just fish habitat,” Olsgard said.

“But the oilsands companies let the problem get so big that now they are just grasping at straws and trying to find the cheapest solution for industry.”

If you have any information for this story, or information for another story, please contact Charles Rusnell in confidence via email.