Canadian Oil Industry Intends to Release Treated Tailings Water Into River

The Canadian oil sands mining industry announced its plans on Thursday to release treated water from tailings ponds into northern Alberta’s Athabasca River, a move that environmentalists fear threatens one of the world’s largest freshwater deltas.

Oil sands companies, unlike other extractive sectors in Canada, are not authorized to release treated tailings water. 

New federal laws, scheduled to be completed in 2025, will control how tailings can be safely drained into the Athabasca, a 1,231-kilometer river that begins in the Canadian Rockies and runs into Lake Athabasca.

Tailings are a harmful mixture of water, clay, sand, residual bitumen, and trace metals that are produced as a byproduct of extracting bitumen from mined oil sands and are held in massive engineered ponds, some of them have been collecting water since the 1960s.

According to industry members, companies must be able to clean and release water in order to reclaim land damaged by oil sands operations.

“The water has to go someplace,” said Rodney Guest, director of water and closure at Suncor Energy.

“To this date, we have been doing everything but releasing the water … while other (water management) options are in play and we have used many of them, they cannot replace the need for water release,” he said.

Original source material for this article taken from here