No evidence to support Alberta agency's claims about cleanup of oilsands spills, study suggests

A new analysis of a decade's worth of data kept by Alberta's oil and gas regulator suggests the agency has made unsubstantiated claims about the success of oilsands tailings spills cleanup.

"Their own data, their ... internal data are not being reflected in the ... information that they're releasing to the public," the study's author, Alberta-based ecologist Kevin Timoney, said in an interview.

"That's a huge problem."

Timoney's study was based on internal documents from the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) about 514 tailings spills reported between 2014 and 2023. He received more than 6,000 pages of documents through an access to information request. 

Oilsands tailings spills — mixtures of water, sand, bitumen residue and chemicals — are considered toxic to fish and other wildlife.

For the 514 spills analyzed in the study, the public database kept by the AER states that 75 per cent were cleaned up and no wildlife effects were reported.

However, according to Timoney's analysis, the regulator doesn't have data to back those claims.

In the internal records he received, Timoney found that 91 per cent of the spills weren't inspected by the regulator. Instead, information was provided by oil companies.

The study said another five per cent had no inspection data of any sort.

"AER's stated policy of 'routine inspections' following tailings spills is not supported by the evidence," says the report, which was published last week in the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment journal.

For the spills that did have inspection data and reports, Timoney found many reports were nearly blank or contained vague information.

He said most of the reports ended with conclusions such as "no environmental impact at this time" or "no adverse effects have been observed." However, the reports did not provide any environmental assessment to support the finding.

Timoney, an ecologist with Treeline Ecological Research and a longtime researcher of the environmental impacts of the oilsands, aid he wasn't expecting the AER to have the most detailed information but said he was surprised to find "nothing."

"They don't go out and they don't count dead animals," he said. "They don't determine the contaminant levels in the soil or in the groundwater or in lakes.