I’d been told to arrive early, in case either side tried to pack the house. The day was skillet-hot and a considerable swath of western Canada was on fire. Nonetheless a long line of folks was already forming. News coverage put the crowd at 500, wearing “cowboy hats, belt buckles and jeans.” Pardon me, but that’s a Yellowstone fantasy. It wasn’t a rodeo. People came in assorted attire. I got a seat near the front. Soon it was standing room only. Someone said the fire code had been reached.

The speakers—a UCP “A-Team”—took the stage: premier Danielle Smith, Brian Jean, Rebecca Schulz, RJ Sigurdson and local MLA (and moderator) Chelsae Petrovic. During intros I became aware that, for perhaps the first time in my life, I was at a political event where “my side” was in the majority.

The speakers began their spiels on mining, particularly the disputed Grassy Mountain project. They gave their takes on the Oldman River: whether selenium from coal was a risk to fish and people. All swirled to the conclusion that mining was fine. They claimed to have looked at every aspect, to have read peer-reviewed this and peer-reviewed that. They admitted to a few challenges but were still pro-mining. Often mentioned were the terrible, onerous mega-lawsuits threatened by Aussie coal moguls, who’d received promises and wanted their investment back with interest, plus billions more for inconvenience. Gina Rinehart et al. should be allowed to continue to moil for Crowsnest coal, lest we be sued into oblivion.

Sitting there, I mused that the advent of democracy might have been like this: shouting, fists shaking, wild.

Then the booing, hissing and shouts began. In response to the most dubious statements, small signs shot up: “Lie.” Liar.” “Betrayal.” It got loud. At times very loud. Your humble correspondent confesses he didn’t attempt journalistic neutrality. I had my own signs. I did a bit of shouting.

At times it got thunderous—and what a good feeling for a person who has listened to long miles of speeches about the essential harmless goodness of Alberta’s extractive industries. Having grown up a few hundred metres downwind of an “experimental” sour gas plant—from which my family often ran for their lives—I was exhilarated to hear folks of all kinds criticizing the provincial government at volume.

The illustrious panel began exhibiting signs of ire and discomfort. They might never before have faced a room so largely in disagreement with them. The pro-coal part of the crowd wasn’t cowed. They’re Albertans too, staunch and tough. They clapped and cheered when they felt their side had scored. But Anti-Coal had the numbers.

Sitting there, I mused that the advent of democracy might have been like this. At school we were shown square-bearded Athenian men in white tunics walking calmly to this or that side of the room, voting with their feet. But maybe it wasn’t like that. Maybe it was like this: shouting, fists shaking, wild. In any case I felt democracy had finally come to my place, and I was there to see it. Your humble scribe.

At one point Jean jumped to his feet and leapt into the crowd, like a rockstar, to give a guy his business card. Jean was roaring like a bull. Basically, he was saying: I’m everything to everyone! I snowmobile. My relatives are First Nations! Don’t tell me I don’t know about the environment. I’m from the oil sands! (I’m still confused by that one. I’ve screwed up landscapes bigger than this…?)

A favourite point by the government speakers was that the selenium problem is over-amped. Not a problem, really. These assertions got the loudest boos. This is one subject I have researched thoroughly. A recent study of the coal dust blowing from a mine in BC into Alberta’s Crowsnest Lake (from which a branch of the Oldman descends) found selenium in excess of what’s safe for fish. Some of the netted fish had deformed spines and gills. The crowd, which can also read studies, would not sit there quietly and be told that selenium in lakes and rivers is safe. Nor could they be told science was on top of the problem.

Ultimately, it came down to premier Smith. She spoke last and answered many questions from the audience. I must admit she’s good at remaining dignified and cool. Her body language said: You won’t rout me!

Some in the crowd seemed disgusted at both sides. The rude audience offended their sense of decorum. I won’t apologize, but I understand their point. Southern Albertans believe in manners. In our defence, we’ve been ignored and legislated against and polluted and lied to. Whatever we registered on the Rudeness Scale was a result of being smirked at and imperiously brushed off—not just that night but for decades.

To quote Joe Flaherty and John Candy playing hillbillies on SCTV: “It blew up real good!”

Fred Stenson’s many books include the novels Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

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Premier Smith also demands that there be no federal emissions cap. Alberta’s oil and gas industry must be allowed to emit freely. As for Planet Earth: “Burn, baby, burn!”

She hasn’t yet said if there will be an Alberta Oath of Allegiance in which citizens must deny the existence of global warming. But neither has she ruled it out.

The premier wants her own provincial pension plan and reckons that all of Canada should pay for it. When Alberta was booming and was the go-to place for Canadians wanting to make quick money, these “Albertans” overpaid into the federal pension system. Though a lot of those people are back in Newfoundland, Smith wants their pension payments to flow back into an Alberta Pension Plan. It should be mentioned that few pensionable Albertans want anything to do with Danielle’s Alberta Pension Plan.

Smith and her UCP cozy up to Trump despite the fact that our province could wind up being the next Puerto Rico.

But that’s beside my point. The point is that Smith and her UCP are, generally speaking, gung-ho and fearless. They cozy up to US president Donald Trump despite the fact that our province could wind up being the next Puerto Rico. As Monty Python said in a movie, they (that is, Trump and Co.) fart in Canada’s general direction.

So, fearless—except for one thing. Danielle Smith and her UCP are mortally afraid of being sued.

Back in 1976 Peter Lougheed’s government came up with a policy that slammed the door on future coal mining. When the UCP came into power in 2019, they felt much warmer toward coal. Across the border, on BC’s Elk River, a roaring coal operation was making good money for the BC government—and also making a lot of residual selenium that was killing fish in the rivers. That water shouldn’t be imbibed by humans lest, among other things, their hair falls out.

But none of this dissuaded the brave UCP government when the Australian coal companies came calling, wanting to start new operations along Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. The government founded a committee of investigation to look into new coal mines. Though the committee recommended against it, the UCP rescinded 1976’s Lougheed coal policy anyway. People living downstream from these possible new mines stood up and roared. It would take much more than a column to describe the many facets of that anti-coal resistance. But one example was Lethbridge city council voting nine to zero against coal development upstream of their water supply.

All Alberta’s government had to do at that stage was say no. But, very oddly, they did not. In fact, in all sorts of ways, they’ve said yes. This is where we get back to the subject of fear.

At the suggestion that the Alberta government might back out, Australian coal companies threatened lawsuits. A famous Aussie litigator was dispatched to Alberta. The Aussies also engaged a long-historied Alberta law firm to represent them. In these threatened lawsuits, some rather gaudy financial compensation numbers were floated.

The interesting thing here is that a lot of wise legal heads were saying, “Let the Aussies go ahead and sue.” The history of such suits is that there would indeed be compensation demanded and paid, but that it would be much smaller than the asked-for amounts.

But the UCP government, normally so brave, froze. Deer in the headlights, as we say. Another analogy might be that the government was like a loud braggart who, at the sight of a snake, curls on the ground and cries.

This contradiction sent me into research mode. My question was: is there such a thing as fear of lawsuits And by gosh, there is! Liticaphobia. There’s even a branch of psychiatry that deals with it. Psychotherapy. Hypnotherapy. Prescription drugs. I seriously think the premier and her affected cabinet ministers should seek help. Further into my research, I discovered that liticaphobia is not equally spread across the landscape. There are hotspots. The US as a whole is such a hotspot, globally speaking. And, within the US, the most affected region is the state of Florida.

This was my eureka! moment. Where has Alberta’s premier gone most often of late Florida!  My advice is obvious. Alberta’s politicians should cease going to Florida immediately. It is hoped that, if they follow my advice, they will soon be brave enough to face the Australian miners in court.

Fred Stenson’s many books include the novels Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

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This summer, halfway through a blistering dry spell reeking of forest fire smoke, I hiked up a coal exploration road with fisheries biologist Lorne Fitch. This was on Cabin Ridge, a lovely piece of elk country that divides the headwaters of the Oldman and Livingstone rivers.

The coal companies hope to strip that mountain down for the coal hidden inside it. Perhaps that’s why their network of coal exploration roads felt so aggressive. Big, graded gravel roads zigzag up the mountain now, gouged into its slopes as much as two or more metres deep. The companies hadn’t started mining the mountain yet—if there is any sanity at all in the land of Jasons they never will—but we could see where they had already begun to undermine our water future.

Where the road cut into the once-pristine slopes, it had brought shallow groundwater to the surface, just as a knife slash brings blood from just beneath the skin. That water was now fouled with algae, warmed by the sun and evaporating into the drought winds sweeping down the valley. For millennia, water from melting snow and spring rains had soaked into that mountainside’s soils and seeped slowly downslope to be released, weeks later, as clean, cold spring water into the river below. There it sustained native trout populations and lush riparian wildlife habitats on its way downstream to our kitchen sinks, gardens, industries and farm fields. But the water we saw that day was all destined to evaporate. It would never reach the river, never sustain our province’s communities and economy.

Coal strip mines waste even more water when the companies steal water from tiny headwater streams and groundwater aquifers to control dust and wash coal—contaminating the runoff with toxic selenium and evaporating the rest. Less water reaches the rivers, and it’s full of toxins when it does.

This is no longer news to most Albertans, because we’ve been trying to argue sense back into our rogue government for months now. When their coal policy panel reports to Energy Minister Sonya Savage late this fall, we’ll see how well they listened.

But what might be news to many of us is that coal is not the only strip-mining threat facing our rivers and putting our water future at risk. Another mineral resource is mined all across the province, one to which we have become so accustomed that most of us can’t see the harm it causes. I’m talking about aggregate: gravel and sand.

Alberta’s economy doesn’t need coal exports, but we do need aggregate. It goes into road-building, concrete manufacture, structure foundations and various other uses.

We simply can’t source gravel from our stream floodplains any more than we should continue the insanity of stripping coal out of our Eastern Slopes.

Unfortunately, when companies mine aggregate in the wrong places, they often interfere with shallow groundwater aquifers or—in the worst cases—carve holes in river floodplains that capture and divert water meant for other uses.

Vivian Pharis, a well-respected Alberta environmentalist, was one of many who tried to prevent a now-approved gravel pit on top of the aquifer that feeds water into the beautiful tufa springs of Bighill Springs Provincial Park, north of Cochrane. She points out that two square miles of additional land adjacent to the park, all on top of the same aquifer, have been bought up by gravel operators for future strip mining. It’s a crazy risk.

One of those operators, Burnco, recently sought approval for massive new pits stretching 6.5 km along the Bow River west of Cochrane: 389 hectares of hole-in-the-ground. Fortunately, after learning of the threat to water safety that mining on this scale would create for the Stoney-Nakoda and the Town of Cochrane, Rocky View County approved only 65 hectares. But that will still add to the many hundreds of hectares already mined along the Bow River—many depleting or damaging groundwater.

When those pits fill with water, they become evaporating ponds. Water that evaporates is gone. That which remains becomes heated and, too often, contaminated. Cut by cut, approval by approval, gravel strip mines are evaporating our province’s water supply even as a changing climate makes each drop more precious than ever before.

We simply can’t afford to source gravel from our stream floodplains and source-water areas any more than we should continue the insanity of stripping coal out of our Eastern Slopes. Water is simply worth more than gravel or coal.

Kevin Van Tighem’s Wild Roses Are Worth It: Reimagining the Alberta Advantage, was released in spring 2021 by RMB.

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Minister Savage and Premier Jason Kenney obviously underestimated the wrath of the Downstreamers. While there are many valid reasons to be concerned about coal mines in Alberta’s Eastern Slopes, the primary one seems to be the health and cleanliness of the streams and rivers that flow out of the Rocky Mountains through rolling ranchlands and the increasingly crowded exurbs, suburbs and urban areas of Edmonton, Red Deer and Calgary. Local alt-country music sensation Corb Lund summed it up best: “I know there’s always two stories, and there’s always different values to balance. But I gave it my best shot, and I took in all the information for weeks and studied it. And I got to tell you, I’m kind of pissed off.”

He’s not alone. The new Protect Alberta’s Rockies and Headwaters (PARH) Facebook group grew to more than 35,000 members, 10 times more supporters than various Alberta-based “Stop the Tar Sands” groups. These PARH groupies responded to Minister Savage’s announcement with a flurry of heart and thumbs-up emojis as Alberta’s growing anti-coal movement rejoiced. A few days later, however, when the smoke had cleared and the twin blinders of euphoria and optimism had worn off, it became crystal clear that the return of the coal policy and the promise of future public consultation would do little to halt the revival of coal mining on a massive scale in Alberta’s sublime southern Rockies.

“Cancel all exploration permits and revoke all leases on the Eastern Slopes,” posts David Patterson every chance he gets. Patterson, a former engineer with Syncrude Canada, lives in Edmonton, some 300 km downstream of the Obed Mountain, Coal Valley and Vista coal mines near Hinton. “Anything else is just a BS con game.”

PARH has several seasoned veterans in its ranks, including a former Banff National Park superintendent, a few current or former professional environmentalists and a couple of biologists that used to work for the provincial government, but it’s obvious many of its members are brand new to the deadly serious game of environmental politics. Despite living in a democracy that often acts like a wholly owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry, these folks are totally unfamiliar with the laws and regulations that determine whether and how industrial projects are allowed to proceed, never mind the history of overly discretionary policy processes that have allowed unchecked industrial development to spread like a cancer across our public lands. For some, it has come as quite a shock to learn that the politicians they voted for in the last election—politicians who campaigned on expanding the already toxic and destructive oil sands—would allow foreign-owned coal companies to set up shop in the mountains they can see from their doorsteps.

Few of the PARH groupies, for example, were even aware that the owners of the proposed Grassy Mountain (photo p 27) coal mine, 7 km north of Blairmore in the Crowsnest Pass, had applied for a mining permit six years ago, during the NDP’s tenure in power, and have been building roads and drilling exploratory boreholes ever since. Ranked #6 on Mining magazine’s “Top 10 Mining Projects to watch in 2021,” Grassy Mountain is proposed by Benga Mining Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Riversdale Resources, an Australian company. Benga/Riversdale proposes to remove the top 430 metres of Grassy Mountain and extract some 93 million tonnes of metallurgical coal over 23 years, bringing with it “much-needed foreign investment to the Canadian economy along with the creation of hundreds of jobs in Alberta.”

Grassy Mountain is the test case in the UCP government’s Black New Deal with the coal industry, and it’s already in the final stage of a multi-year environmental impact assessment. Although conducted on behalf of both the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) and the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, the joint review is basically run by and for the AER, an industry-funded agency responsible for regulating oil and gas activity and coal mining in Alberta. The AER has frequently been criticized for failing to provide adequate oversight.

The Grassy Mountain environmental impact assessment is overseen by a three-member joint review panel chaired by Alex Bolton. Bolton, the AER’s chief hearing commissioner, like most hearing commissioners, has a long history regulating or working for the drillers and diggers of fossil fuels. Having chaired the joint review panel for Teck’s Frontier oil sands mine and been a member of the panel that assessed Shell Canada’s Jackpine oil sands mine, Bolton knows more than a thing or two about the social and environmental impacts associated with giant industrial energy projects. If there is an Alberta-trained master at this game, Bolton is it.

Despite constant claims that Alberta has a “world-class regulatory regime,” environmental protection in this province is weak, which may be why we don’t have our own environmental impact assessment legislation. The provincial Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act does include an “environmental assessment process” to evaluate “plans to mitigate any adverse impacts from the proposed activity,” but it’s worded in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with our Coal Conservation Act (or our Oil Sands Conservation Act), the purpose of which is “to ensure orderly, efficient and economic development of Alberta’s coal [or oil sands] resources in the public interest.” In short: The starting point of AER hearings is that coal mines are de facto in the public interest.

Thankfully for those Albertans opposed to new coal mines, the federal government has the ability and arguably the obligation to wield a bigger and better stick on behalf of those who care about, say, clean water and the recovery of species at risk. It was known as the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012, recently replaced by the Liberals’ new Impact Assessment Act, 2019, which Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has asked a court to denounce as unconstitutional to prevent the feds from interfering in his plans for the coal industry.

The main purpose of both the former Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and the current Impact Assessment Act was and is “to protect the components of the environment… that are within the legislative authority of Parliament [things like threatened and endangered fish species and the habitat they depend on] from significant adverse environmental effects caused by a designated project,” followed closely by an obligation to “ensure that designated projects… are considered in a careful and precautionary manner to avoid significant adverse environmental effects.”

With such an experienced joint review panel chair and the strong arm of the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA), what could possibly go wrong?

The lengthy drama of formal environmental impact assessment in Canada has three acts. Act I involves a company proposing a “designated project” and hiring an army of consultants to assess the project’s potential adverse environmental effects. In the case of Grassy Mountain, Riversdale (in Canada, Benga Mining operates as Riversdale) submitted an environmental impact statement of thousands of pages in August 2016, along with applications for the permits it would need from federal and provincial government agencies to build the mine. These company-generated analyses are notorious for being overly optimistic and grossly incomplete, and Riversdale did not disappoint.

Of the 162 identified possible negative effects on everything from old-growth forests and wildlife to air and surface water quality, apparently not a single one would be significant. The impact statement proposed that any and all impacts that would occur, including the total destruction of portions of streams that are listed as critical habitat for Alberta’s SARA-listed westslope cutthroat trout, could be tidied up and mitigated away when the mining is finished and the landscape reclaimed.

This is what the late, great David Schindler, who passed away in early March (see p 24), recognized as far back as 1976 as “The Impact Statement Boondoggle.” Industry consultants, he wrote in the journal Science, write “large, diffuse reports containing reams of uninterpreted and incomplete descriptive data, and in some cases construct ‘predictive’ models irrespective of the quality of the data base.” These short-sighted simulacra of rigour “seldom receive the hard scrutiny that follows the publication of scientific findings in a reputable journal.” Nothing much has changed since.

In the fall of 2020, just as social media began to ignite the digital tinder of public outrage, it was time for Act II, the public hearing. This is the heart and soul of any environmental impact assessment, whereby members of the public, especially those who can demonstrate they would be “directly affected,” weigh in on the inevitably sanguine conclusions in the environmental impact statement. For the first time in Alberta history, the process was live-streamed on YouTube for all to see.

Gary Houston, Riversdale’s vice-president of external affairs, set the tone of the proceedings on October 25, two days before the actual hearing began. “We’ve filed 20,000 pages, we’ve been under the scrutiny of dozens of federal and provincial regulatory agencies,” he told the Calgary Herald. “I can’t imagine there are many questions left to be asked. Nonetheless, the process needs to be completed, and based on the work that we’ve done, we’re ready to put our best foot forward.”

For the next five weeks, Riversdale’s lawyers and experts tried to bolster the idea that the digging of a coal mine would do little harm to the stream beds and ecosystems it would strip away in the headwater tributaries of one of southern Alberta’s most important waterways, the Oldman River. On the other side of the virtual courtroom, lawyers and ranchers and scientists queried and countered Riversdale’s claims and promises, all in an attempt to point out that the mine would harm many of the things they cared about: dark skies and quietude; clean, selenium-free water; open rangelands and intact ecosystems; the need to quickly lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduce our reliance on coal to maintain some semblance of a stable climate.

They were right to be suspicious. Right next door, just over the Continental Divide from the proposed Grassy Mountain mine, the BC and federal governments have allowed Teck Resources to construct the coal mining equivalent to the oil sands: five giant open-pit or mountaintop-removal mines in the Elk Valley, despoiling the area. Predictably these gaping holes have created many of the problems Grassy Mountain’s decriers foresee. Perhaps the most relevant is the poisoning of the Elk River and its tributaries with toxic amounts of selenium which are now 75 times the limit set out in BC’s water quality guidelines, reducing westslope cutthroat trout populations by 93 per cent.

On day one of the Grassy Mountain hearing, Margaret Fairbairn, Environment and Climate Change Canada’s acting regional director, got straight to the point: The model Benga/Riversdale used to calculate the selenium limit in the effluent it wants to pour into Blairmore Creek “is based on assumptions… that decrease our confidence in the limit’s ability to ensure protection to the aquatic ecosystem” and “we have no basis upon which to validate any conclusions put forward by Benga regarding selenium….” Which is a polite way for a bureaucrat to say your predictive models aren’t near good enough for us to allow you to build a mine.

A month later, on November 24, the Grassy Mountain public hearing zeroed in on the future prospects of Alberta’s westslope cutthroat trout. Three expert witnesses for opponents of the mine—a hydrogeologist, a fisheries biologist and an aquatic ecologist—testified about the inadequacies of Riversdale’s models, the overly optimistic conclusions about their ability to mitigate their impacts, and the federal government’s legal obligations to protect Alberta’s ailing westslope cutthroat trout, whose range has declined by 80 per cent over the last century because of, among other things, the destruction of its habitat by the very atrocities Riversdale’s promoters are proposing to impose on Grassy Mountain.

Who cares about trout when an entire mountain ecosystem is at risk Lawyers.

Unlike in the Elk River watershed in BC, Alberta’s cutthroat trout population is listed as “threatened” under the federal Species at Risk Act. And unlike other environmental laws and regulations, both provincial and federal, SARA obligates (rather than simply empowers) the government to protect
their habitat.

The trout’s federal recovery strategy has identified a host of streams and creeks along the Eastern Slopes—specifically at and around the proposed mine site—that are critical to the species’ survival. SARA, unlike the federal Fisheries Act or any provincial legislation, prohibits any person (or corporation) from “destroying the functions, features and attributes” of Gold Creek and its tributaries and the Oldman River and its tributaries (and many more waterways in the area). The punishment for doing so is a fine up to a million dollars or up to five years imprisonment.

“I think it’s reasonable to suggest that the prognosis for viable westslope cutthroat trout will certainly worsen if the footprint of mining development in the southern East Slopes is enlarged,” said John R. Post, a University of Calgary professor and co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada’s freshwater fish specialist subcommittee. He added that the Grassy Mountain mine will destroy more critical habitat than Riversdale’s consultants estimate. “The project will involve a net harmful alteration and disruption or destruction of fish habitat, and therefore fails to ensure the distributional and population objectives for the SARA-listed species and will jeopardize the survival of the species.”

So why would Benga’s corporate executives even propose to build a mountaintop-removal mine in critical habitat for a SARA-listed species Because they think the federal government will let them get away with it.

The public hearing for the Grassy Mountain coal mine adjourned with a click on December 2, though the public could submit further concerns until January 15, 2021. “I think we made a bit of history here in conducting such a large and complex hearing in a fully online format,” Alex Bolton said before signing off and blinking out.

It won’t be surprising if that’s the most exceptional outcome of the Grassy Mountain environmental impact assessment. Bolton’s panel has until June 18, 2021, to submit its final report to Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, who will then have 150 days to issue a decision statement from cabinet. Unless another coal mine tailings dam collapses and releases another 670 million litres of toxic wastewater into a nearby river, as happened at the Obed coal mine near Hinton in 2013—or by some miracle Jason Kenney has a revelation from God about the evils of coal—history indicates it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Bolton’s panel will conclude three things in its final report:

One, that regrettably and with a heavy heart, the project will likely have some significant adverse environmental impacts on a long list of things Albertans thought were protected by law, as well as on Indigenous land use, rights and culture.

Two, that the mitigation measures proposed by the owners of the mine are not proven to be effective.

And three, that in spite of all of these effects and the lack of a plausible mitigation plan, the project will provide significant economic and employment benefits, and therefore, under our authority as the AER, we consider these effects to be justified and the project to be in the public interest.

This is more or less the language used by Bolton and his AER colleagues to justify the approval of the last two oil sands mines, Shell’s Jackpine expansion (2013) and Teck’s Frontier (2019). Teck ultimately pulled the plug on its Frontier mine before the federal government decided whether to approve it, but Trudeau’s cabinet likely would have given it the thumbs up even though it would have been among the most destructive oil sands projects assessed to date.

Unsurprisingly, the Harper cabinet readily approved the Jackpine expansion, a project that required the diversion of a major river in the region and destroyed woodland caribou critical habitat, which species the federal government has so far refused to protect on provincial land with an emergency order under SARA.

Compared to Benga’s proposed mine in the Crowsnest Pass, each of these projects is enormous, and the impacts that had to be “justified in the circumstances” were far more devastating than those that would accompany the decapitation of Grassy Mountain. Such is the absurdity of the environmental assessment process in Canada, which purports to protect the environment (among other things) but rarely does any such thing.

Almost without exception, huge industrial projects that impose egregious impacts on Indigenous people, sensitive ecosystems and imperilled species, often in contravention of federal and provincial laws, policies and guidelines, are approved with an unapologetic shrug. The benefits of jobs and tax revenues always outweigh the social and environmental costs.

It gets worse. Once these projects are established, the conditions under which they were approved are often ignored or entirely rearranged in an alchemical process known as “adaptive management.” Oil sands tailings ponds, for instance, are not supposed to leak, and yet they do, seeping as much as 11 million litres of toxic waste into the underlying groundwater every day. A recent report by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation found that even when the seepage was acknowledged in environmental impact assessments and scientific studies, the federal government failed to enforce the pollution prevention provisions of its own Fisheries Act.

Plans for tailings treatment and management at Shell’s Jackpine mine and Muskeg River mine, now owned by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., have been approved by the AER even though they don’t meet the criteria of AER’s existing approvals and fail to meet AER’s requirements and government policy. Now, the provincial and federal governments are preparing regulations to allow oil sands companies to treat and release tailings wastewater into the Athabasca River even though the conditions of their initial approvals prohibited the release of treated tailings into the river.

Coal miners too take advantage of the loosey-goosey nature of Canada’s regulatory system. When Grande Cache Coal reported that selenium levels downstream of its mine in Beaverdam Creek were high enough to pose a risk to native fish populations, AER pointed to the adaptive management provision in their environmental impact assessment and asked the company to install selenium treatment technology. Grande Cache Coal refused because, well, it was just too darn expensive.

Riversdale’s environmental impact statement refers to “adaptive management” over 500 times, a code phrase for “we’ll deal with it when we get there, even if it means reneging on the promises we made.”

It’s no wonder the creeks and rivers downstream from Alberta’s current coal mines already show signs of selenium pollution, and Indigenous people downstream of the oil sands live with the fear of elevated incidence of rare and deadly cancers. The only real surprise is that the PARH groupies and the Downstreamers are so shocked that the provincial government wants to build yet another mine in yet another important watershed—and that there are few legal ways to stop it.

Despite the doom and gloom of history, there is a glimmer of hope. Grassy Mountain and its precious streams may yet be spared. If my predictions are correct, and Bolton’s panel finds Riversdale’s pet coal project very much in the public interest despite the obvious problems it presents, the federal cabinet could decline to approve it because it would destroy or otherwise put at risk critical habitat of Alberta’s SARA-listed westslope cutthroat trout, and because the economic benefits of coal these days are just too meagre to justify the mine in the circumstances.

This welcome miracle would set a long-awaited precedent whereby the federal government chooses to give primacy to its legal obligation to protect environmental values under its jurisdiction rather than simply deferring to Alberta’s provincial prerogative for relentless industrial development no matter the cost. Such a move would give pause to other coal companies whose plans involve building mines in the critical habitat of threatened species.

Either way, the decision will likely end up in court. In the unlikely case the federal cabinet refuses to approve the mine, Riversdale and the Alberta government will no doubt take the federal government to court to have the decision reversed. On the other hand, if the feds approve the mine, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans issues a section 73 permit under SARA authorizing Riversdale to destroy critical habitat of a SARA-listed species, environmental groups will likewise ask the courts to overturn the decision because it’s unlawful.

Who knows how a single hypothetical judge would rule in either case. What is obvious, however, is how farcical it is that the fate of a highly destructive industrial project with a multitude of significant environmental impacts hinges on whether or not it destroys a few hundred metres of critical trout habitat—and that far larger industrial projects that don’t involve SARA-listed aquatic species, like oil sands mines, get a free pass.

If Albertans truly care about clean water, healthy fish populations and species at risk—and the maintenance of a modestly stable climate that won’t wreak hell on earth for our children and grandchildren—they would do well to look beyond their parochial concern for what happens on their doorsteps and instead focus on strengthening the laws that govern industrial development and environmental protection. Without such laws, politicians and joint review panels will continue to prioritize corporate profits and environmental destruction. 

Jeff Gailus moved from Alberta to Montana 15 years ago, only to find politicians and voters there to be just as short-sighted and obtuse as they are at home. So it goes.

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The top layer of that sandwich is comprised of alpine grasses, forget-me-nots and stonecrop, glacier lilies and ancient, brave pines whose branches have been gnarled and weathered by centuries of wind. In summer, solitaires and blue grouse huddle against the ground to hatch their eggs while grizzlies dig out marmots from under lichen-encrusted boulders. Winter’s howling winds scour snow into the trees below while bighorn sheep and elk eke out a survival ration of dry grass.

At the bottom layer, water that originated as snowmelt and rain, having seeped and dripped through shadowed layers of rock, emerges cold and clean in springs that feed small creeks whose floodplains are mosaics of spruce and meadow, birdsong and water chatter. Native westslope cutthroat trout rise for mayflies, and in the deeper shadows immense bull trout fin quietly above the clean gravels to which they return each summer to deposit their eggs.

And the middle of the sandwich Unprocessed wealth: black bituminous coal.

Perhaps it’s not so much a sandwich as a sort of geological lasagna, with layers of coal intermixed with shale and sandstone, and everything tending to run together once you slice into it. Whatever foodie metaphor you choose, it’s a big chunk of Alberta. High-grade coal deposits—ideal for feeding the coking ovens that produce the world’s steel and other metals—crop out intermittently from south of the Crowsnest Pass to north of Grande Cache, a swath of land more than 850 km long and 5–20 km wide.

Setting aside the ethics of profiting from climate change, will coal mining companies destroy our lovely bighorn country and sweet clear streams?

Click here for a map of coal mines in Alberta.

Hunters, anglers, hikers and naturalists think of it not as coal country, but as God’s country. The bighorns, trout and other living things think of it as home. Multinational mining companies have been thinking about it a lot lately. That’s why its future is an open question.

Up to 600,000 ha of our headwaters—an area almost the size of Edmonton—are under lease today for possible future mountaintop strip-mining. Setting aside the ethics of profiting from climate change, whether all those leases become actual mines will depend on whether mining companies like Teck Resources, Riversdale and Montem can rip the middle out of the sandwich without also destroying that green and lovely bighorn country on top and those sweet clear streams below. They probably can’t.

Alberta’s coal originated between 140 and 65 million years ago in lush, well-vegetated swamps that probably looked a lot like Jurassic Park. The North American continent floats on an immense plate, and the Pacific Ocean lies atop another one. The slow-motion collision between those plates pushed up the Rocky Mountains and gradually depressed the continent’s interior. Layer after layer of dead vegetation became buried under new greenery. Sand and silt eroding from the young Rockies washed east onto the sinking swamps, burying the layers of peat. As the weight of new sediments grew heavier, the peat was compressed into coal beds layered with shale and sandstone.

The oldest coal deposits became part of the Front Ranges and foothills of the Rocky Mountains as those got pushed towards the sky 80 to 55 million years ago. The coal beds under today’s plains are younger and of a lower grade—good enough for electricity production, but too impure for firing blast furnaces used in steelmaking.

Alberta’s first commercial mine opened near Lethbridge in 1874. Coal heated frontier homes, powered locomotives and fuelled steam-powered farming and industrial equipment. Oil displaced coal for most of those purposes after the Second World War. Starting in 1962, however, coal became important again as utility companies such as Calgary Power began stripping thermal coal from accessible deposits on the plains to generate electricity. By the turn of the century, about half of Alberta’s electricity was coming from coal-fired electric plants.

But coal is a dirty fuel. It releases countless tonnes of carbon dioxide into our warming atmosphere and exposes downwind residents to particulate pollution. That’s why Alberta’s 2015 Climate Leadership Plan called for coal-generated electricity to be phased out by 2030. In the first three years of the plan, Alberta’s coal production decreased by more than one-third. As less-polluting energy sources take over, it might seem like the end of coal mining for Alberta.

But if that’s the case, why have coal companies been taking out big coal leases along the edge of the Rockies?

Metallurgical (coking) coal is used to fire blast furnaces in steel production. Thermal coal may be out of favour as a source of electricity, but the world’s steel demand isn’t going away. The bituminous coal in Alberta’s front ranges is ideal for coking. It’s a lucrative export to overseas steel mills—where it pours CO₂ into the planet’s atmosphere just the same as if we’d burned it here.

In most places where metallurgical coal is mined, giant machines scrape off vegetation and overburden to get at the coal-bearing strata. The coal is stripped out and the remaining rock debris pushed into spoil heaps. The resulting pits and rubble piles can be massive. As the companies exhaust parts of the mine they are required to reclaim the site. That usually involves bulldozing the spoil heaps to slopes of less than 27 per cent and then spraying fertilizer and seed on top to get vegetation established. Even then, toxic chemicals can leach into nearby streams for decades.

The Crowsnest Pass communities and Canmore and Nordegg all began as coal towns and still live with the legacy of abandoned mines. Grande Cache’s boom–bust coal mines closed most recently in 2015. Bituminous coal is still mined at Coal Valley and the Cheviot mine (Cardinal River Coals) which opened south of Hinton when the nearby Luscar and Gregg River mines closed down. Alberta’s metallurgical coal production is barely half the level it was five years ago but Alberta Energy expects production to increase again in 2019 now that the Grande Cache mine has reopened, and with the start of production at the Vista mine just east of Hinton.

In spite of the recent downward trend, the June 2018 Canadian Mining Journal was almost breathless in its excitement over the prospects for new coking coal development in Alberta: “Canada is the world’s third-largest exporter of metallurgical coal, with 85 per cent of our production in Alberta and British Columbia… Preliminary numbers from Natural Resources Canada show that the total value of Canada’s coal production increased 55.6 per cent to reach $6.3-billion in 2017 as a result of higher prices for the second year in a row.…

“While BC is the powerhouse producer of metallurgical coal in Canada… Alberta’s production will increase in the coming years. It is no secret that Alberta’s foothills and Eastern Slopes hold major deposits of high-quality coking coal, and several projects are moving towards production.”

The company everyone is watching is Benga Mining (a wholly owned subsidiary of Australia-based Riversdale Resources). Should the company’s Grassy Mountain project survive a joint federal–provincial environmental review currently underway, the company plans to open a 2,800-hectare mountaintop removal mine north of Blairmore by 2021.

Other companies are waiting to see how Riversdale does with the Grassy Mountain approval before advancing mine development plans of their own. Montem Resources hopes to reopen another abandoned mine in the area and has leased an incredible 220 km² stretching well north into undeveloped terrain. Max Wang, CEO of Montem’s predecessor company, Atrum, was quoted in a recent Calgary Herald story: “I would say the industry is looking to the success of Riversdale’s project, because it’s the first in the Crowsnest Pass area. There are quite a number of global investors, mostly from Australia, interested in that region.”

The proposed new Grassy Mountain coal mine falls almost entirely in the Municipal District of Ranchland, but Cam Gardner only learned about the mining plans through a story in a Crowsnest Pass newspaper. At that point, Riversdale Resources had already spent several months grooming the neighbouring MD of Crowsnest Pass, making donations to popular local causes and getting company staff appointed to volunteer boards.

Gardner, who stepped down as reeve of the MD of Ranchland in early 2019 to run as the NDP candidate for Livingstone-Macleod, ranches in an isolated valley west of Chain Lakes Provincial Park, an hour’s drive north of the pass. It should be a paradise, but coal is already breathing down his family’s neck. Gardner says that they regularly hear explosions from the Fording River mines owned by Teck Resources, 40 kilometres to the west in BC. Montem’s undeveloped leases adjacent to Alberta’s Forestry Trunk Road (Highway 940) are even closer.

At night, the glow from the BC mines is brighter than the glow from Calgary. “Teck took away our Northern Lights,” he says.

“Crowsnest Pass has almost made the transition out of a boom and bust resource economy,” Gardner continues, shaking his head over the degree to which some locals have become mine boosters. “They’ve gone through all the pain of watching the big resource companies shut down to the point where they almost are where Banff and Waterton are, and now they just want to go back to boom and bust.”

While Crowsnest Pass flirts with a return to its polluted past, other former coal mining communities have found prosperity by embracing the more pristine attractions of nature. Like the Crowsnest Pass, Canmore also began as a coal-mining town. Its last mine closed in 1979. By the early 1980s it was a struggling backwater. After the 1988 Winter Olympics brought the world to the Alberta Rockies, however, the town blossomed as a tourism and second-home mecca at the doorstep of Banff National Park. Gardner and others see its thriving economy as an example for the Crowsnest Pass if it were to embrace its proximity to the new Castle Provincial Park and other nearby protected areas rather than once again succumb to the seduction of King Coal.

The coal always runs out, after all. Investors pocket their profits and move on. Towns are left in crisis, the land with open wounds. And coal mining doesn’t even put a lot of money into the province’s treasury to help mitigate those consequences. Annual royalties from all of Alberta’s metallurgical coal mines amounted to barely $5-million in 2018.

If the world’s continuing hunger for metallurgical coal leads to a coal mining renaissance along the front of the Rockies, what will that mean for the rest of the ecological sandwich wrapped around those coal seams?

Where many biologists turn up their noses at reclaimed coal mines, Beth MacCallum adopts a more pragmatic—even optimistic—view about the implications of ripping the top off the coal sandwich. She’s worked on reconciling mining with wildlife since she first arrived in Hinton in 1985. When MacCallum started working on the area’s coal mines, government was promoting better reclamation standards for strip mines but had little experience achieving them. She’s seen enough evolution in practice to now believe that reclamation can restore ecosystem values even if it can’t restore aesthetics. Since Teck Resources closed the Gregg River and Luscar mines in 2000 and 2003 respectively she’s provided wildlife habitat advice to help the company gain certification of their cleanup efforts.

Some of the world’s largest bighorn sheep occupy those mines. Early reclamation efforts focused on simply getting green vegetation growing, so the mine managers planted tame pasture mixes that included a lot of alfalfa and clover. The reclaimed sites became giant salad bars, custom-made for bighorns. The world-record hunter-killed bighorn ram, until recently, was shot just outside the mine boundary. Each fall, hopeful hunters wait for the next massive ram to step across the line and into the record books.

Planting tame hay doesn’t replace the ecological diversity lost when land is stripped for mining. But MacCallum says that good mine planning and continuing improvements in reclamation techniques can get partway there. The key, she says, is to stockpile the bulldozed soil for as short a time as possible before spreading it on reclaimed ground. If rain doesn’t wash away the soil, the still-viable seeds and root fragments of native grasses, wildflowers and shrubs can resprout. Mines that continually reclaim behind them as they open new seams can move freshly disturbed ground onto newly reclaimed slopes. They still end up with too many weeds and non-native grasses but there is far more natural diversity than the old-style reclamation that makes trophy hunters happy.

Mine reclamation can restore some ecosystem values. But sulphates, nitrates and heavy metals seep into groundwater and streams for decades.

The Luscar and Gregg River mines may soon be certified as fully reclaimed, at which point Teck Resources will hand the land back to the Alberta government. MacCallum says that wolves are already denning on the mine property and it has one of the highest densities of grizzly bears north of the North Saskatchewan River. Marmots are abundant, as are their predators. In fact, she says, most of the original native fauna now thrive on the reclaimed lands. Some wildlife guides even bring clients to the mines instead of nearby Jasper National Park. There’s better wildlife viewing there. That, and the potential for displacement of habituated wildlife by hunters and photographers, is why MacCallum hopes the reclaimed mines will continue being managed as wildlife sanctuaries.

Other problems, however, are more intractable. Perhaps the most troubling is the release of toxic chemicals from the billions of tonnes of shattered rock that accumulate during the life of a mine. Snowmelt and rainwaters leach sulphates, nitrates and heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium and selenium into groundwater and streams for decades.

Teck Resources operates five coal strip mines in the Elk River valley, just across the Continental Divide from the Alberta deposits currently being eyed by Riversdale and Montem. Selenium pollution from those mines has caused fish kills, deformities and spawning failures in the Elk and Fording Rivers. A 2013 University of Montana study documented selenium concentrations seven to 10 times higher than natural levels. That triggered a review by the International Joint Commission, which mediates transboundary water issues between the US and Canada. Federal fisheries officials in Canada became concerned when native cutthroat trout in the Fording River started showing deformities.

Faced with the risk of limitations on their future expansion plans, in 2014 Teck Resources committed more than $600-million to efforts to reduce selenium pollution. One of its first efforts was to build a cutting-edge bio-remediation facility at Fording River. Soon after the plant went into operation, however, large numbers of dead trout appeared in the river. It was shut down and subsequent analysis showed that in removing one selenium compound from the water, the facility was actually releasing a more dangerous version of the toxin. The federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans fined the company $1,425,000. The plant remains closed. The problem seems insoluble—but Teck still hopes to expand.

“There is a question as to whether the technology even exists to remove selenium from large volumes of flowing water, and there is no viable solution to remove selenium from groundwater,” US commissioners to the IJC wrote in a 2018 report.

Coal mining doesn’t put a lot of money into Alberta’s treasury. Royalties amounted to barely $5-million in 2018.

And Teck’s selenium problems aren’t just confined to BC. Monitoring downstream from the Hinton-area mines in creeks containing the rare and threatened Athabasca rainbow trout has shown levels of selenium contamination two to four times higher than federal guidelines for the protection of aquatic life. Although Teck reports no evidence of harm to the trout, fisheries biologist Carl Hunt points out that evidence of mortality is always hard to find in the wild because selenium is most toxic to eggs and young fish. Compounding the problem: selenium is more toxic to native rainbow trout than to the introduced eastern brook trout—a species that tends to out-compete our native trout at the best of times.

Farther south, in the Oldman River headwaters, Alberta will soon have to decide whether to allow Australian-owned mining companies Riversdale and Montem to open new mines on leases that cover an area almost as large as the Elk Valley mines. Such approvals would almost certainly inflict water pollution on downstream ecosystems and water users: our streams are small, water is scarce, and the wind blows much more strongly than on the BC side of the mountains. Pollution will likely be more concentrated in streams and more widely dispersed on land.

Rancher Jillian Lawson pointed out the intractability of the problem during a joint federal–provincial panel review of the Grassy Mountain project. Noting that the proposed mine would rely merely on settling ponds and rock filtration to treat water before releasing it into streams containing westslope cutthroat trout—a nationally designated species at risk—she added: “The dust and fly ash from the proposed mine(s) would be blown far and wide, especially in the prevailing—and increasingly extreme—southwest winds to contaminate other sources of water, including the snow pack on the mountains… where it could make its way to ground water which recharges domestic wells and essential natural springs…”

Fisheries biologist Lorne Fitch says native cutthroat trout are already extirpated from 80 per cent of their historic range in Alberta. Some of their last productive habitat is the streams draining the coal deposits Riversdale and Montem hope to develop. There’s little likelihood that those streams will survive mountaintop-removal mining. Even if some do, chances are that non-native fishes more resistant to pollution will replace the unique native cutthroats and bull trout.

In a 2005 Alberta Views essay about the Cheviot mine, geologist Ben Gadd wrote: “Alberta’s mining industry is capable of overcoming any opposition and spoiling any place it wishes, including lands as beautiful and ecologically important as Mountain Park. Our province needs a government able to enact truly protective laws and willing to enforce them. It needs regulators with backbone.”

If the next metallurgical coal boom leads to massive new mines in the headwaters of Alberta’s Oldman River the beauty of that country will be impaired forever. Bighorn sheep and the other wildlife with which they share the high, windy slopes will likely persist, albeit in strangely artificial, man-made habitats. Streams will still flow east to the thirsty plains, but devoid of native trout and loaded up with toxic chemicals.

And somewhere else in the world, that Alberta coal will be combusted, releasing hundreds of millions more tonnes of carbon dioxide into the planet’s warming atmosphere.

But the investors feasting on Alberta’s coal sandwich will have made some money.

Based in Canmore, Kevin Van Tighem is a writer, AV columnist and former Parks Canada superintendent.

The post The Plans to Strip-Mine Coal in the Mountains appeared first on Alberta Views.

That’s Jason as in Kenney, the long-serving Conservative MP for Calgary Midnapore, former federal minister and current leader of Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives. Also, depending on whose prognostications you believe, the unstoppable uniter of Alberta’s right and inevitable next premier of Alberta.

Last fall Jason’s campaign team took to Facebook to explain his passion for coal in this manner—presuming here they meant he dug it in a dated-beatnik-slang way and not that he actually worked in a coal mine and they were describing that work in the style of an early-childhood reader—because Rachel Notley’s NDP government has launched a plan to phase out all of Alberta’s coal-fired power by 2030. Coal currently produces about half of the province’s electricity (51 per cent in 2015), some 6,267 megawatts (MW). And because coal is Alberta’s second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions (after oilsands production) and the most readily replaced, Notley’s government intends to supplant it with a mix of renewables and natural gas, which emits substantially less greenhouse gas per unit of energy generated—up to 50 per cent less, depending on the efficiency of the natural gas plant.

He’s hep to none of that jazz. The phase-out’s a big drag (on the economy). I mean, he’s against it, daddy-o.

Jason, who digs coal, does not dig this phase-out. He presumably also does not find it groovy, nor a gas. (Which is ironic considering, as noted, Notley’s plan relies on lots of natural gas, gas, gas.) Anyway, the Facebook post contains a video, and in it Jason stands in front of a coal plant near Edmonton on a gloomy winter day. He calls the phase-out a “reckless attack on Alberta’s economy” that unfairly targets “inexpensive, reliable and environmentally efficient modern clean coal technology” and “will do nothing in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions.”

Kenney’s coal-digging soliloquy echoes the sentiments of the opposition Wildrose. Alberta’s right, then, is already united on this front. They do not want coal phased out. They do not want the carbon tax that similarly aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They are hep to none of that jazz. They think it’s all a big drag (on the economy). I mean they’re against it, daddy-o. Which, in a free and democratic society, is certainly their prerogative.

But a question arises: If not a coal phase-out, then what Does Jason, who digs coal, have other ideas about how to reduce emissions and combat climate change If so, he hasn’t told anyone. So I decided to ask him. He is a campaigning politician and I ask people questions for a living, so surely it would be a straightforward journalistic thing. Mr. Kenney, you dig coal. You oppose phasing it out. What would you propose to do about climate change instead Simple enough. Or so I thought.

Before we get into Jason’s elusive plan, though, let’s look at why the Notley government does not dig coal—or at least wants to stop burning it to produce electricity—and how it intends to replace the coal power it phases out.

The short answer is simple. Burning coal is the most climate-damaging way to generate power. By a wide margin. It is also enormously harmful to human health. And there is a wide range of cleaner electricity options, at about the same or even a lower price—hydroelectricity, natural gas, wind, solar. “Our province is without question the biggest coal pollution emitter in Canada,” Notley explained in her state of the province speech last October. “That is going to end.”

Phasing out coal is widely considered the lowest-hanging fruit in the global fight against climate change. Ontario completed its phase-out in less than a decade, eliminating more than 7,000 MW of coal-fired power and becoming Canada’s leader in emissions reductions in the process. The UK and France are eliminating coal entirely in the next 10 years. So is New Zealand. Coal’s share of US electricity production declined from more than 50 per cent in 2005 to less than 40 per cent today. This is a trend even the unhinged and deliriously coal-friendly Donald Trump is unlikely to reverse, because coal’s decline in the US has been driven primarily by the plunging price of natural gas, not by a government phase-out.

Alberta currently has 18 coal-fired power plants, which generate 43 megatonnes of greenhouse gases per year—about 18 per cent of the provincial carbon footprint—and cause an estimated $300-million in healthcare costs and 100 premature deaths each year. Eliminating all that power might sound like a tall order. But consider that the phase-out will occur over more than a decade, and that 12 of the 18 plants were already scheduled for decommissioning by 2030 under new regulations brought in by—dig this—the federal government of Stephen Harper, which enacted them with the full support of a caucus that included a non-dissenting minister named Jason, who digs coal. Alberta is proposing to shut down its remaining six coal plants by 2030 as well, which is between six and 31 years ahead of schedule, depending on the plant. Those six power plants are the cause of all the commotion.

In place of all that coal Jason digs, Notley’s government has come up with a cautious, slow-building, multi-step plan. This is in part aimed at letting the changing marketplace inform future power procurement decisions. But it’s also being done this way so as not to spook the big horses in Alberta’s power-generation barn, the TransAltas and ATCOs and Capital Powers who operate those old coal plants.

The centrepiece of the NDP plan is a mandate to derive 30 per cent of Alberta’s power from renewables. This will bring 5,000 MW of new wind, solar and other renewables onto the grid, procured in tranches to avoid getting locked into any particular long-term path. Bids for the first phase of 400 MW launched early this year, to be built and connected to the grid by 2019. By contemporary industry standards, this is neither a lot of green power nor a rapid transition. It is, for example, about 5 per cent of the amount of wind energy that Texas has installed since 2010. And for at least the first few phases of Alberta’s transition, wind will provide the bulk of the green power. Alberta is the third-biggest wind jurisdiction in Canada, with almost 1,500 MW connected. Many of our large energy companies—TransAlta, Enmax, Enbridge, Suncor—already operate wind farms.

The remainder of the new power needed by 2030 is expected to come largely if not exclusively from natural gas. On the surface this might not seem very green, even though natural gas produces much less CO₂ per megawatt. But natural gas makes a lot of sense as a medium-term solution. For instance, it provides the owners of those six coal plants facing early retirement the option of converting them instead to natural gas, recouping some of the plants’ sunk costs.

In any case, the transition remains flexible and open to change with market conditions. Alberta will save at least a little space on the grid for micro-generation, allowing for community-scale renewables projects and household-scale solar power. (In February the government launched a rebate plan intended to get 10,000 roofs solar-panelled by 2020.) And should the “clean coal” that Jason digs—which is to say a coal plant that actually sequesters a substantial portion of its emissions rather than simply producing slightly less—in fact become a commercial reality rather than a costly experiment within a few years, there’s room in the NDP plan for that too.

All of this is to be paid for not through higher energy prices but through carbon tax revenues, which will also compensate companies and communities forced to close their coal plants early. Kenney has spoken of “tens of billions” in costs, but that estimate—presumably based on the grid overseer agency’s estimate of $25-billion—includes new power procurement to meet future demand and to replace the 12 coal plants closing thanks to Stephen Harper’s regulations. The Alberta government’s own estimate of its share of the phase-out is $4-billion.

Meanwhile headlines have howled about imminent power bill hikes. But the province has introduced a price cap to ensure the phase-out won’t send bills through the roof. The cap is set at 6.8 cents per kilowatt-hour—much higher than current prices, which have sunk to historic lows below 4 cents, but almost exactly equal to the average price over the last decade and nowhere near as high as prices have spiked on occasion. In spring of 2013, for example, the price was more than 10 cents per kilowatt-hour for months. Albertans did not collapse under the strain.

After some weeks I’d not heard back from the media representative for Jason (who digs coal), regarding my interview request. So I decided to attend one of Jason’s campaign-trail “town halls,” hoping to ask him what he would do about climate change instead of phasing out coal.

The event was at the Hotel Blackfoot in southeast Calgary on a dark winter weeknight. But say this for Jason, who digs coal: He can pack a house even on a cold Wednesday in January. The crowd overflowed the parking lot, and by the time I got to the registration table, the faithful had filled the main hall. I found a spot against the wall in a spillover room and watched via live feed on a big screen. It turned out to be standard stump-speechifying, not a free-flowing interactive town hall, and I despaired for my chance to ask my question. Also I got the sense it’d be a little gauche of me to intrude, because this climate change thing was a pretty petty detail to fret over when Rachel Notley was SHREDDING THE VERY FABRIC OF THE PROVINCE AND DESECRATING ALL WE HOLD DEAR. (That, to be clear, is more paraphrase than direct quote.)

Jason Kenney believes Notley’s “ideological” government amounts, basically, to a new self-inflicted Dust Bowl.

Jason, who digs coal, actually delivered a calm, engaging, occasionally funny stump speech. He opened with a joke about coming to the event in a pickup truck, not a fuel-efficient Toyota Prius, which went over very well. Then he spent the next 15 minutes relating anecdotes about Alberta’s economic hardship, all of which is the fault of Notley’s “ideological” government and which, in sum, represents basically a new, self-inflicted Dust Bowl. Jason, who digs coal, used “ideological” a lot in his speech—I lost count at around half a dozen—and he didn’t talk much about oil prices or what impact they might have had on Alberta’s economy. He said he wanted to unite Albertans who “want their province back” and hope to “regain Alberta” and “put Alberta first” and MAKE ALBERTA GREAT AGAIN. (Again: ALLCAPS = paraphrase.)

After the Dust Bowl reprise, Jason, who digs coal, explained all the many reasons why the “multibillion dollar carbon tax” was wrong and bad and also really wrong. Then he turned to coal, which he digs—though he did not, on this night, linger on it. Getting rid of coal, he said, would lead to astronomical energy bill increases, perhaps 40 to 50 per cent, because that’s what happened in Ontario. (It would probably also have been gauche of me to intervene to ask whether Notley’s price cap is in fact designed explicitly to avoid even the barest similarity to Ontario’s experience. Also I knew the answer was yes.)

After that, Jason talked for a long time about how to unite the right, and then there were questions, all but one of which came from the room he was in, not mine. I was way too slow on the draw to ask my question on this night. One question was about the carbon tax, though, and Jason, who digs coal, promised that if he becomes premier, he will immediately convene a special session of the legislature to pass “Bill 1: The Carbon Tax Repeal Act.”

This might be redundant even to note, but nothing in the evening’s program indicated what Jason, who digs coal, might do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions after repealing the carbon tax and cancelling the coal phase-out. There were evidently more pressing issues.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on Jason, who digs coal. Maybe he’s got a plan so brilliant and winning it can’t be spoken of yet.

The NDP government’s climate plan has certainly not been flawless in execution. The coal phase-out’s biggest snarl, by far, has been sorting out compensation for the “power purchase agreements” (PPAs) with the province’s big power companies. PPAs are long-term contracts under which companies agreed to buy power generated at set wholesale rates and sell it to consumers at market rates. The contracts were created after Alberta’s electricity market was deregulated in 1996, as a guarantee that consumers could be sure of a steady supply of power regardless of market fluctuations.

When it came time to settle the PPAs in light of the coal phase-out, the Notley government got a troubling look at Alberta’s convoluted machinery governing electricity distribution. A clause in those PPAs was known in the business as an “Enron clause” because the failed Texas energy broker was so fond of them and in fact directly intervened with the Alberta government to have this one inserted. The Enron clause stated that the companies could terminate the PPAs if a change in provincial law rendered their business “unprofitable or more unprofitable” during the contracted term.

The “or more unprofitable” part is a huge, indeed Enron-sized loophole, through which companies could legally demand—using the coal phase-out as justification—that the government pay for all kinds of ill-advised business shenanigans. Which is what happened. The power companies said the province was on the hook for all their losses. The government thought this was a bad deal and pushed back, even threatening to pass legislation to retroactively rewrite the contracts. This caused a brief spasm of panic among municipal leaders—the head of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce used the term “banana republic,” while Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi more delicately called it “absolutely nuts.”

In the end Alberta did not take a Central American turn over the PPAs. Instead, the government picked up the part of the unprofitability caused by the coal phase-out—an estimated $600-million—and power companies agreed to cover losses due to unexpectedly low market prices (about $300-million) which had nothing to do with the phase-out.

Meanwhile the NDP’s embryonic energy transition may be trying too hard to please big companies such as TransAlta and ATCO. Ontario eliminated 7,600 MW of coal power in barely a decade. And Alberta’s plan so far has given short shrift to small, entrepreneurial firms looking to add solar panels and farm-scale waste-to-energy plants to the grid. This might make sense today from a cost perspective—big wind farms produce cheaper energy than rooftop solar arrays do—but it’s shortsighted to make a shift this substantial without encouraging grassroots participation. One of the crucial lessons of the chaos that has engulfed Ontario’s shift to green energy is that if you wait too long to offer communities a way to share in the transition, you can lose their support for the entire endeavour. Possibly no jurisdiction on earth has more rural hostility to renewable energy than Ontario, and this is in significant measure because the initial profit for the wind farms popping up all over the Ontario countryside went entirely to companies with no roots in the communities where they were putting up turbines.

Still, the Notley government appears to recognize the broader opportunity buried in the coal phase-out. Opposition critics like to shout about the couple of hundred jobs to be lost in Hanna and Wabamun when the coal plants shut down, but they refuse to even consider the hundreds or even thousands of jobs to be gained as Alberta becomes a real player in the renewable energy business. More than half the world’s new electricity capacity installed in 2015 was renewable energy; employment in Alberta’s coal industry peaked in the 1920s, as it did across North America. Which trend line looks like the wiser one for Alberta to ride?

What’s more, part of the thinking behind the coal phase-out is that it will demonstrate measurable action on climate change at a time when the province’s oilsands industry has become the poster child for climate destruction. The oilsands could even contribute directly to the transition—some in situ facilities already use natural-gas-fired cogeneration to produce steam and electricity. A University of Calgary study suggested this could be put “on steroids” to help the coal phase-out and reduce oil patch emissions. Using more coal now—or post-election in 2019—would be a clear signal to the world that Alberta has opted out of action on climate change, at a moment when the oilsands is desperate for the social licence it needs to continue to operate.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on Jason, who digs coal. Maybe he’s got a better plan in the works, a plan so brilliant and winning it can’t even be spoken of yet. I can’t say for sure, because his campaign office never responded to my four interview requests. The closest I got was a brief Twitter exchange with his account, which may or may not be written by Jason between diggings of coal but in any case is phrased as if he’s speaking for himself.

Last November I posted a link on Twitter to a story about British and French plans to phase out coal. “Another couple data points conspicuously absent from @jkenney’s analysis of the coal industry,” I wrote.

In a reply, @jkenney posted a link to a story about the 60-odd new coal plants in the works in Japan and South Korea.

“So as premier,” I asked, “you would wait until Japan and South Korea phase out coal to take action on climate change?”

Kenney replied in two tweets:

“1/ I wouldn’t kill thousands of jobs, turn entire communities into ghost towns, & hike power prices in order to shut down our most … 2/ modern & environmentally efficient 5 coal plants, while the rest of the world is building 2,300 new coal power plants.”

This is boilerplate stump speech stuff. You can find the same arguments and the same data points in that Facebook video explaining why Jason digs coal. And it’s littered with misdirection and falsehood. Coal operations at Grande Cache, frequently cited by Kenney as a victim of the phase-out, have scaled down twice and then unveiled plans for reopening in recent months as the price of the steelmaking metallurgical coal mined there has fallen and risen. Fears of “hiked” power prices conveniently ignore the price cap. “Environmentally efficient” presumably refers to the fact that newer coal plants burn less coal than older ones and spew less pollution. They’re still by far the dirtiest and most emissions-intensive way to make electricity in Alberta or anywhere else.

And what of the 2,300 coal plants Near as I can tell, that figure comes from a 2015 report by the legendarily impartial World Coal Association. It was a cumulative total of all coal-fired power plants then in the planning or construction phase—510 under construction, 1,874 being planned, a grand total of 2,384. (If Jason digs coal so much, he could even round his total up to 2,400.) More than 60 per cent of these are planned for China and India. Since that report, however, China has announced significant cuts to its coal ambitions, cancelling or putting on hold plans for nearly 300 coal plants and introducing an absolute cap on its coal capacity. India has similarly said it will stop building new coal plants by 2022. Jason also didn’t mention India has more than twice as much renewable power as coal power in the works today.

So why does Jason dig coal so much? He would seem to be rejecting the argument that phasing out coal is an essential step in reducing Alberta’s greenhouse gas emissions. Which might imply that Jason, who digs coal, doesn’t think emissions reductions are necessary, which might in turn imply that he doesn’t think any action is needed on climate change.

Kenney has always flirted around the acceptable edge of that question. In a CTV interview just before he returned to Alberta to launch his PC leadership campaign, for example, he said, “Virtually everybody accepts that there is such a thing as a man-made contribution to climate change and we have to be prudent in reducing greenhouse gases. I don’t disagree with that.”

So let’s give Jason, who digs coal, the benefit of the doubt. He does not state in public that climate change isn’t real. He just doesn’t give a shit about it. At all. Any Albertan who does might give some thought to what kind of person they want as their next premier.

Chris Turner’s latest book, The Patch, the story of Alberta’s oilsands, will be published in September.

The post The Coal Phase-Out appeared first on Alberta Views.

Every day, Alberta consumes more than half of the coal used for power generation in Canada. That makes the province ground zero for all things coal in the country. And right now, coal has plenty of issues. After providing countless kilowatts of electricity in Canada and the US, coal is now a preoccupation for environmental policy makers in both countries. In September, Environment Canada came out with new regulations that could mean no coal-fired power plants are ever built here again. Under President Barack Obama, the US Environmental Protection Agency, similarly, is hastening the closure of hundreds of coal-fired electricity generating stations. For some of coal’s critics, it’s a long-awaited victory. They also know it hardly spells the end for King Coal, which has survived much fiercer opposition than a few johnny-come-lately regulatory changes.

Coal currently accounts for roughly 60 per cent of Alberta’s power generation, compared to 16 per cent for Canada as a whole. In the US, 42 per cent of the country’s power comes from coal. Indeed, across North America, coal-fired plants form the backbone of an electrical grid that’s taken the better part of a century to assemble. Dismantling this network just isn’t in the cards. Notwithstanding the fortune spent on the labyrinth of power stations and transmission lines scattered across the continent, our society and our economies—whether we want it or even realize it—are addicted to the steady steam of electricity those plants kick off. Cheap and reliable power forms the foundation of empires past and present, and ours is no different. What’s changed is our understanding of the costs of that power.

Alberta is at a nexus of sorts. Our fleet of coal-fired power plants is aging. A big chunk of Alberta’s power supply, for instance, comes from facilities built in the 1970s. As these plants near the end of their useful lives, the province has a window to make decisions that will affect how power is generated here for decades to come. It’s a rare opportunity. The power industry is the definition of a long-lead-time business. Plants on the drawing board today are already being counted on to supply electricity years down the road.

At the same time as Alberta’s fleet of power stations is beginning to turn over, federal and provincial policy makers have come out with new regulations to curb future carbon emissions. In addition, economic growth and a rising population will require Alberta to increase total electricity production by nearly 50 per cent within the next decade. Taken together, all of that means choices made today will go a long way in determining what Alberta’s electrical grid—and its emissions—will look like until the middle of the century, if not longer.

Cheap power forms the foundation of empires. What’s changed is our understanding of the costs.

Whether coal giveth more than it taketh away is hardly a new question. In England, blacksmiths have been burning coal since the Middle Ages. The first complaints came shortly after. In the 14th century, King Edward I instituted a ban on coal to appease nobles bothered by its noxious odour. It didn’t last. Aversions to the smoke and stench were no match for its blessings. And so it’s been ever since. The soot, smoke and other nastiness that come from burning coal are trumped by what it brings to the table.

In 1860 coal’s benefits were memorably enumerated by American philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote: “Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta; and with its comfort brings its industrial power.”

From its earliest uses, coal has been alternately lauded and vilified. As Emerson suggests, perhaps nothing is as singularly responsible for bringing the comforts of the industrial age to humanity. Much of the warmth, mobility and industry the world now takes for granted can be traced back to coal. In the 18th century, coal brought the steam engine to life, and the steam engine opened up the world. Certainly, the legacy of the industrial revolution isn’t entirely positive, but it’s not like life beforehand was a prelapsarian picnic. Suffice to say that from an economic standpoint those lucky enough to sit atop abundant stores of coal have long luxuriated in the advantages it gives them over places that don’t.

Alberta, naturally, counts itself among the lucky. Of Canada’s bountiful coal reserves, 70 per cent are found here. Broadly speaking, coal can be divided into two types: metallurgical coal, used in steel-making; and thermal coal, burned to produce electricity. The province’s “met” coal, as it’s known, is moved by rail to the coast. From there it’s loaded onto ships and makes the long voyage across the Pacific, where it eventually ends up in the steel foundries of Japan and other places. The relative scarcity of met coal makes it worth the trouble and expense of shipping it across an ocean. Thermal coal—which is more readily available around the world, is not as pure and contains less energy for the same volume—is a different story.

The name of the game for thermal coal is proximity. The prohibitive expense of shipping thermal coal across an ocean makes the very idea a non-starter. Net-net, transporting the coal would take more energy than the power produced from burning it. That’s why, ideally, coal mines and power plants are located side-by-each in what are known as mine-mouth operations. If a company mines its own coal as feedstock for a power plant, it can cost less than $20 a tonne. In comparison, contracts for steel-making coal range upwards of $200 a tonne.

In Canada, production of met coal is dominated by BC. By comparison, Alberta churns out less than an eighth of what BC extracts from mines in places such as Sparwood and Elkview. Thermal coal is a different story. Output from Alberta’s eight thermal coal mines, which are scattered through the centre of the province between Calgary and Grande Prairie, accounts for roughly 70 per cent of the thermal coal produced in Canada. The largest of these mines, Highvale, west of Edmonton, is far and away the country’s biggest coal mine. At 13 million tonnes, its output is more than a third of Canada’s total annual production.

In 2011 the province collected $6.5-million in royalties from thermal coal. Including met coal, the tally came in at over $31-million. That’s notable, but relatively speaking it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the oil and gas industry, which sent more than $7-billion into government coffers last year.

Royalties, however, aren’t all the province gets from its coal reserves. For their 40 pounds a day, Albertans get power—and lots of it. In Alberta, coal possesses at least four qualities that make it the fuel of choice for power generation. It’s abundant, relatively cheap, reliable (it doesn’t need the sun to shine or the wind to blow) and the infrastructure it feeds is already bought and paid for. Alberta produces coal-fired power at only six sites, but those plants combine to kick off 6,242 MW of power, or 46 per cent of the province’s total capacity of 13,660 MW. The province’s coal-fired generation is ahead of natural gas (40 per cent) and way out in front of wind (6 per cent) and hydro (6 per cent).

While Alberta’s energy mix will shift in the coming decades, the province isn’t about to turn its back on coal. Whether one talks to the ministry of Energy or Environment, government officials maintain a consistent stance—we have coal, we need it, so we’re going to be sure to use it. “We’ve conservatively estimated that we have enough coal to last 1,000 years,” says Energy spokesperson Christine King. “I don’t know if we’re pro-coal, but we have the resource, so we would like for it to be used, and used in a way that’s obviously sensitive to the environment.”

The utility sector is Alberta’s largest source of GHGs, accounting for 40 per cent of total emissions.

It’s that last bit, the environment, that moves the story of coal from a benign tale about economic prosperity into a darker place. The everyday to and fro of flicking on light switches, recharging cell phones and toasting bagels comes with a steep price. “You can pick a pollutant, basically, and it’s probably coming from a coal plant,” says Tim Weis, a director of renewable energy policy at the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental think tank.

Burning coal produces a raft of by-products, none of which can be considered remotely good. Among them are lead (bad for the brain), sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides (which cause acid rain), chromium and arsenic (carcinogens) and mercury (which eventually ends up in oceans, poisons fish and is the reason pregnant women avoid sushi). Then there’s air pollution. Coal certainly isn’t the only contributor to smog, but it’s a biggie. A study by the Canadian Medical Association found that poor air quality caused 620,000 doctor visits in 2008. The CMA pegged the economic costs of bad air that year at $8-billion.

None of that even accounts for the main problem. From a global perspective the most profound worry about coal-fired power generation comes from carbon dioxide: more greenhouse gases come from power generation than any other sector. Numbers from the International Panel on Climate Change show the power and industry sectors combine to contribute 60 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Alberta is no exception. The utility sector is the province’s largest source of greenhouse gases, accounting for 40 per cent of emissions, according to a 2009 report from Alberta Environment. In short, burning coal creates a heck of a lot of CO₂.

In an effort, presumably, to boil down a complex issue into a graspable notion, the global climate change summit in Copenhagen in 2009 left us with a single number to hang on to—2° Celsius. If temperature increases can be held to 2°, then we just might avoid the worst of the dire predictions for global warming (rising oceans, flooding, drought, species extinctions, famine and the other all too familiar Horsemen of the Climate Change Apocalypse).

Right now, the chances of making that target aren’t looking good. Scenarios outlined in a recent report by researchers at MIT put the range of global temperature increases at between 3.5 and 6.7°C by 2100. And that presupposes countries meeting Copenhagen commitments, which is hardly guaranteed.

In September, Environment Canada moved forward in its attempt to curtail GHG emissions by adopting new regulations for coal-fired power plants. Conceptually, the new rules, significantly weaker than earlier draft proposals, are designed to phase out coal-fired electricity and replace it with cleaner sources of power. Specifically, the regulations will require new power plants, regardless of fuel source, to meet the same level of emissions as a combined cycle natural gas-fired facility (in other words, a cleaner burning plant that produces both heat and electricity). If, at the end of an existing plant’s “useful life,” defined as 50 years, a facility can meet that standard, it can keep running. If it can’t, it will have to undergo a massive retrofit to bring it up to code or, more likely, close down.

The new rules, which will apply to future power generation, come into force in 2015. Alberta’s existing plants, however, can keep running status quo until the 50-year mark is reached. For plants built in the 1970s and 1980 that sets an end date around the 2020s. Newer plants—and their emissions—will be with us for even longer. TransAlta’s new 495 MW Keephills 3 facility, for one, was commissioned in 2011, which means it won’t be up for decommissioning until 2061. Relative to older coal-fired plants, Keephills is a clean-burning operation, but it’s still roughly twice as dirty as natural gas. Overall, the new regulations mean the greening of Alberta’s electricity grid will come in fits and starts over the next five decades. The particulars of how Alberta meets the new federal standards could also change if the province cuts its own deal with Ottawa.

Under the new rules, a plant is classified as “existing” if it’s operational before July 1, 2015. As it stands, this would suggest the last coal-fired plant in Canada has already been built. A possible exception is a proposal from Maxim Power to extend the 2015 deadline in order to build a 500 MW coal plant at the site of its current facility near Grande Cache. Critics say the proposal is trying to exploit a loophole that will keep Alberta in the business of coal-fired generation well into the 2060s. According to the Pembina Institute, emissions from the new plant would be the equivalent of adding 600,000 new vehicles to the road. A regulatory decision on the project is pending.

Worker at a power plant. (Curtis Comeau)

The clean-energy potential offered by carbon capture and storage is making strange bedfellows out of environmentalists and the coal industry. In brief, CCS covers a range of technologies designed to cut the amount of CO₂ that the burning of hydrocarbons releases into the atmosphere. The best known of these strategies is so-called end-of-pipe technology that captures CO₂ as it leaves the smokestack and sequesters the gas deep underground. CCS also includes pre-combustion options that attempt to strip coal of its CO₂ before it’s burned.

In a perfect world, environmentalists would like to see everything powered by renewable energy, but most know that’s not a practical possibility. For the foreseeable future places with a lot of coal, like Alberta, are going to burn it. Given that reality, developing CCS technology may not be the ideal solution, but it may be the best option the planet has in the fight against global warming.

Canada’s coal industry agrees, although for different reasons. In the long term, the pending federal regulations are putting coal-fired power generation behind the eight ball. If existing plants are going to keep burning coal once they hit the 50-year mark, CCS is the only way they’ll be able to meet the lower emissions standards. Readily available CCS technology could also spur a renaissance for King Coal, allowing a new generation of coal-fired plants to crop up in the province.

The stumbling block for coal advocates and environmentalists alike is cost. Around the world, CCS projects are still in the pilot stage. The problem isn’t so much technology—we know how to do it—but economics. As it stands, CCS is simply too expensive, which is why no commercial-scale CCS projects exist anywhere in the world.

The new federal regulations, suffice to say, are a source of much frustration for coal players. The industry “fully supports reducing emissions from electricity generation—that’s not our argument,” says Ann Marie Hann, president of the Coal Association of Canada. “We’re prepared to do everything that’s physically possible within the technology that’s known today… what’s happening here is that we have regulations that we can’t possibly meet.”

The magic bullet for CCS to become economically viable is for governments to put a price on carbon emissions. If power generators had to pay for the CO₂ they create, market forces would bring the price of CCS down in a hurry. Until then, however, CCS is in an expensive limbo. The world needs it, but it’s a money-losing venture for industry.

Alberta got a first-hand look at that reality earlier this year when TransAlta cancelled Project Pioneer, a CCS initiative at its Keephills 3 plant. The project was in line for nearly $800-million in grants from the federal and provincial governments, but TransAlta said it still couldn’t make the numbers work. The cancellation was a disappointing setback for both CCS and the province’s hopes to curb GHG emissions. Alberta does charge large industrial emitters $15 a tonne for carbon emissions, but that figure is miles short of the amount that would be needed to provide a power company with the economic incentive to go ahead with a major CCS venture.

Right now, much of Alberta’s environmental agenda is based on a climate change strategy unveiled in 2008. In broad strokes, Alberta’s plan targets a 50 megatonne reduction in emissions by 2020. By 2050, the province hopes to halve emissions from business-as-usual levels, which would equate to a 14 per cent reduction below 2005 emission levels.

One of four pilot projects to receive provincial funding from a $2-billion fund created in 2008, Project Pioneer was a big part of Alberta’s hopes for CCS. The other three projects, two for the oil sands and the other a pre-combustion coal gasification undertaking, are still proceeding, but, as the only end-of-pipe strategy, the Keephills 3 project cancellation was a tough pill to swallow for the province. “Let’s be blunt about it: [Project Pioneer] was an important project for a number of reasons,” says Bob Savage, director of the province’s Climate Change Secretariat. “It was for electricity, which is an important part of our energy system, but it was also important because it was for coal. We’re sitting on a huge supply of coal and we would like to keep clean coal as part of our energy mix.”

In Alberta’s power generation sweepstakes, coal’s drawbacks are turning into a big win for natural gas. Not only is natural gas cleaner, but the energy industry’s use of fracking and horizontal drilling has opened up new sources of supply that have North America suddenly awash in gas. The abundance of supply and promise of more to come has slashed natural gas prices well below historical averages. The lure of cheaper feedstock coupled with tighter emissions standards means much of the new generation that will come on-stream in the next decade will be fired by natural gas.

“In other parts of the world, they’re building coal [plants] like there’s no tomorrow, but in North America Absolutely, there will be a change-out across all jurisdictions from coal to natural gas,” says John Esaiw, director of forecasting for the Alberta Electric System Operator. According to AESO, Alberta needs to add a significant amount of new generation in the coming years, particularly given the tight correlation that exists between economic growth and electricity usage. A combination of Alberta’s oil-sands-driven economy, a growing population, the retirement of older coal-fired plants and a recent dearth of new generation coming on-stream means Alberta’s electrical grid has a lot of catching up to do. By 2022, the province expects to increase total generation capacity by more than 40 per cent to 19,555 MW.

By then AESO expects natural gas will account for 54 per cent of the grid, more than doubling coal’s 25 per cent share. Wind is also expected to make more of a contribution, jumping to 13 per cent, or more than 2,500 MW. In absolute terms, though, coal will still account for 4,832 MW of generation. Indeed, the most recent forecast from the National Energy Board, which uses different assumptions, sees Alberta’s coal-fired generation still accounting for 5,788 MW in 2022, a decrease of only 7 per cent from today’s levels.

For those concerned about the huge amounts of CO₂ coming from the power sector, the prospect that coal isn’t going anywhere—despite new federal regulations—is alarming. If Canada hopes to truly get a handle on emissions, they believe it must wean itself off coal much faster.

Worker at an open-pit coal mine near Hinton. (Curtis Comeau)

Others suggest the considerable hand-wringing taking place in Canada is misplaced. Getting off coal, the thinking goes, will only sacrifice one of Alberta’s competitive advantages, while also making electricity more expensive for Albertans. Moreover, coal-fired emissions are increasing so quickly in the developing world that any cuts made here are insignificant. As per usual, this line of thinking uses China as Exhibit A. By 2025 China plans to build enough power generation, much of it coal-fired, to service another 300 million people. That’s essentially adding the equivalent of the entire US electrical grid over the next 15 years.

According to Pembina’s Weis, the China default is exactly the problem facing the environmental movement in its attempts to limit global warming. “Any solution will require reductions at every level. That includes us and that includes China,” he says. “There isn’t one tap that we can turn off. It’s all these little taps… that’s why it’s so hard to make progress. It’s a massive incremental problem that will take a massive incremental solution. It really is going to need every person and every company and every country and every city doing their small part.”

Alberta’s coal reserves, he says, combined with the engineering and geological expertise available here, mean the province could play an outsized role in helping the world tackle the problem of climate change. If CCS can be proven in Alberta, the know-how could then be exported to help clean up coal-fired generation around the globe.

Richard Adamson, the director of Carbon Management Canada, agrees. “These arguments that [CCS] is too expensive To me those aren’t relevant arguments. The question is ‘this or what?’” he asks. “If you can find something that’s less expensive that can be implemented at the scale and at the pace that’s required… then I am 100 per cent behind it.” Getting CCS to the point where it can make a dent in global carbon emissions will take some combination of social pressure and political will. From his vantage point, Adamson doesn’t believe either is currently in place in Canada, though he believes that can change.

Scott Fitzgerald once observed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” He may as well have been describing coal. The benefits of power and prosperity that come with burning coal are set against the considerable costs to health and the environment. To date, the immediate has always trumped the eventual, and the world has continued to function. In the context of global warming, however, the planet can’t wait much longer.

Opponents of coal can’t understand how anyone—government, corporation or individual—can stand by when the dire consequences of carbon emissions seem so clearly evident. To those on the other side, the arguments for cheap and reliable energy seem equally pressing. Jobs, bills and mortgages are much more tangible than mercury-laden fish, asthma patients and the amorphous hazards of global warming.

The world will get off coal eventually—or at least it probably will. But with the clock running on 14,500 pounds apiece, timing clearly matters a great deal. Too fast and economies could suffer mightily. Too slow and global warming may mean the eventual finally closes the gap on the here and now.

Paul Haavardsrud has reported on the energy industry for Dow Jones, the National Post, the Calgary Herald and CBC radio.

The post A Burning Dilemma appeared first on Alberta Views.

It was August of 1969. Bumping Northward from Nordegg along the old forestry trunk road, I came over the top of the Cardinal Divide for the first time and saw it: Mountain Park. Below lay an enormous meadow, invitingly green against the forest fringing it. To my left were the cliffs of the Rocky Mountain front ranges—to my right the long, gentle ridge of the divide, its higher reaches clad in flowery alpine tundra.

Except for a small graveyard on a knoll, the community was gone. Large piles of blackened rock told that the departed residents had made their living mining for coal. And therein lay the curse of this exquisite place.

From the time the first mines opened in 1912 until the advent of the diesel locomotive killed the coal market in 1950, the landscape had taken a beating. It wasn’t a terrible beating; the mining had been mainly underground, leaving most of the area untouched.

In the mid-1980s I was back in the upper McLeod Valley, leading natural-history tours. My groups of wildland enthusiasts would dangle their feet off the crest of the Cardinal Divide and complain about the noisy jeeps, motorcycles and quads, not about the mine tailings, which were now minor elements.

Then came Cheviot.

There are two kinds of coal mined in western Canada: cheap, low-grade coal for burning in power plants and expensive, high-grade coal for converting to coke, the purified coal used in blast furnaces. Since the 14th century, blast furnaces have been used for smelting iron. Layers of iron ore and coke are loaded into the furnace and then lit. When the coal is burning well, the air supply is partly cut off. A fire starved for oxygen produces carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide, and what carbon monoxide wants in the worst way is more oxygen. In a blast furnace, it gets it from the iron-oxide ore, which converts the ore to metallic iron in the process. Steelmakers are picky about the kind of coal they buy. Much of the stuff mined in the Canadian Rockies is terrific.

In the late 1960s, when Japan had once again become an industrial power and began importing a lot of its iron-smelting fuel from western Canada, coal companies went back onto their underground-mine leases and began digging, mainly in the Crowsnest Pass area and south of Hinton. Cardinal River Coals (CRC), a joint venture between Luscar Ltd. and CONSOL, began mining in 1969 at the old Luscar mine site, just north of the hamlet of Cadomin.

This was open-pit mining. The miners excavated huge holes over a hundred metres deep along a 10-metre-thick coal seam that plunged steeply into the earth. They dumped enormous quantities of broken rock onto wildland, burying valleys and producing strange-looking artificial hills devoid of trees.

CRC and other mining companies in the area cut down the forest, bulldozed wildlife and wildflowers and devastated the rich upland ecosystem on the eastern doorstep of Jasper National Park. And there was no public consultation.

The coal companies saw it differently. They were creating jobs, complying with government reclamation regulations and creating habitat for bighorn sheep. Never mind that the jobs depended on the ups and downs of the coal market, that it was impossible to “reclaim” an open-pit coal mine to its original state, or that the sheep were doing fine before the mines drew them to eat the non-native clover planted there.

Despite what mining companies say, there is no right way to mine for coal. It is inherently nasty stuff. Coal is a significant cause of global warming, not only from the carbon dioxide released when it’s burned, but also from the methane released when it’s mined. Wherever coal is mined the local economy goes boom-and-bust and the landscape gets wrecked. The world should be using as little coal as possible, and we can. There are new iron-smelting methods (pulverized coal injection or PCI and Hlsmelt) that use much less coal.

Mining continued throughout the seventies near Cadomin, where railway transport for the coal was available. But the McLeod headwaters remained untouched. Mountain Park coal would have been more expensive to mine because the old rail line had been abandoned and allowed to decay.

In the eighties the world price of coking coal dipped. By the mid-nineties it had slipped so far that mines in the Canadian Rockies threatened to close. Bad news for the town of Hinton, where many miners lived, but good news to those of us who had seen the open-pit wasteland widening.

In 1984 CRC disclosed to the Alberta government that they were thinking of mining on the old Mountain Park lease. The government replied that they had no objection in principle. Still, given the downward trend of the coal market I doubted anything would come of it.

CRC’s 1996 “Cheviot Mine” proposal took the conservation community by surprise. CRC claimed they needed more coal to fill their orders than the existing pits could supply. But several years’ supply was available on Cadomin Mountain, or by digging deeper at Luscar. The coal market was depressed and the company would have to sink about $200-million into a new processing plant and other facilities to start mining at Mountain Park. Mining there also meant Canadian National Railways would have to rebuild the branch line. However, in the face of reduced profits, CRC was trying to keep its costs as low as possible. That meant shallower pits and more of them—a process more like strip mining than open-pit mining. The mines spread out faster and did more surface damage—and the government permitted it.

At the same time, CRC announced the “Luscar Coal Income Fund,” a complex financial scheme built on the promise of the new mine. I began to think Cheviot was aimed more at people’s pockets than at the coal in Mountain Park. It was high-risk paper, but promised accordingly rich returns. Perhaps the company would sell enough “trust units” to permit the various buyouts detailed in the prospectus, but then not actually do any mining.

The Cheviot project included rebuilding the railway, upgrading the road, putting in a 138-kilovolt power line, constructing a processing plant and explosives factory at Mountain Park, and digging a chain of pits over a period of 20 years. The chain would extend 22 kilometres, about the width of Edmonton. It would be smack in the middle of wildlife habitat zoned “Critical” by the province and essential to grizzly bears from Jasper National Park. The mine would release selenium into the ecosystem; use a great deal of water; destroy rare plants, trout-spawning streams and nesting habitat for harlequin ducks (a species attracting international concern) and many migratory-bird species; and would ruin the recreational potential of the area, which had been proposed for a provincial park.

A lot of those outcomes seemed to contradict provincial and federal environmental protection laws. All of them were beyond the pale for people who loved Mountain Park and the Cardinal Divide and couldn’t bear to see the place destroyed—especially for short-term gain. Even if the mine operated for the full 20 years, which we doubted, the profit wasn’t worth the sacrifice of an ecosystem dating back to the ice ages, or the loss of the long-term recreational income that could be generated by protecting it.

I teamed up with the Jasper Environmental Association, the Alberta Wilderness Association, the Pembina Institute and CPAWS to demand a public hearing, which the province had to provide under its 1976 Coal Policy. A three-person panel— two provincial representatives and one federal—was appointed to hold the hearings in Hinton, where residents had their own response to the mine: signs all over town proclaimed “We Support Cheviot.”

What a misguided position, I thought. The town was already feeding the forest into a huge, stinking pulp mill. This alone made Hinton unattractive to white-collar workers, distance workers, educational institutions, tourists and other recreationists, and the retired—all people who would be happy to live there and provide continuing prosperity, just as they had in so many mountain towns elsewhere in North America. But except for a few locals who helped our case, most who came to the hearings glared at us as outside agitators trying to take away their $50,000-a-year jobs driving haul trucks.

Early on during the hearings I took a chance and went over to speak with some miners. I had just informed the panel of the dubious economic viability of the project, and I wondered whether the miners saw it that way, too. Incredibly, several of them did. Their main worry was that if Cheviot failed to materialize and the existing coking-coal mines closed, they’d have to join a different union to work in Luscar’s power-plant coal mines.

One miner told me privately that he figured the whole thing made no sense, but he wasn’t going to go around promulgating that point of view. Hintonite Mike Bracko, who grew up in Mountain Park and ran the processing plant at CRC’s Luscar mine for many years before retiring, spoke out against Cheviot at the hearings. He and his wife, who now live in Edmonton, suffered socially for it. “When I was a kid I used to walk along the creeks there at Mountain Park,” said Bracko. “During the hearings I relived that. But nobody in Hinton seems to care anymore.” Jennifer Klimek, the environmental lawyer handling our coalition’s presentations, found CRC had repeatedly reported that its own mines had polluted local streams by severely exceeding the limits on mine-released selenium. “Yet the company said at the hearings that it didn’t have any selenium problems,” says Klimek. “We pointed out these kinds of discrepancies so often that company lawyers began to get nervous every time I reached for a new document.”

The panel deliberated until June 1997 and then dismissed our concerns. In their opinion, a 70-square-kilometre moonscape would entail some environmental damage, but most of that was rated “insignificant,” “reasonable” or “justified” because the mine was “in the public interest.”

As Klimek says, “in Alberta the test of public interest is so skewed toward economics that I wonder what we would have to prove to show that any industrial project, no matter how bad it is, shouldn’t go ahead.”

The panel recommended that provincial and federal authorities issue the necessary permits. The mine was to be trimmed down a little at its western edge. The company had to make a few promises about those grizzly bears and ducks. But once that was done, Cheviot would be allowed to proceed.

There were public anti-Cheviot events in Edmonton, and a group of protesters walked all the way to Jasper for a rally. Our coalition took the government to court over some particularly egregious failings in the panel decision. And we won. But all we got was another short hearing in 2000, leading to another Cheviot approval. At least the panel had recognized that Cheviot would be in contravention of the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act, 1994.

With nearly all the required permits in place but coal prices continuing to fall, and CNR refusing to rebuild the branch line to Mountain Park, CRC announced that Cheviot was on hold until the market picked up. At the same time, mine closures in the Hinton and Cadomin area were announced. This was exactly what I had been expecting to hear, along with Hintonites blaming the goddamn environmentalists who had delayed the approvals.

Cheviot was dead and mountain-front mining was dying. I felt sorry for the miners and for the town of Hinton generally, victims of unfulfilled promises. But Mountain Park was safe. Until unexpected circumstances brought the Cheviot monster back to life in a new, more damaging form.

In 2002, CRC applied to the Alberta government to build a long, private coal-hauling road between Mountain Park and its processing plant at Luscar. A press release from CRC said that this road might never be built, but it would be nice to have the approval in place just in case the haul road was needed.

They got their approval, including new leases on the public lands lying between Mountain Park and Luscar. They didn’t have to hold further hearings on the consequences of putting all that land in private hands, or the effects of blasting a 40-metre-wide road to Mountain Park and running 240-tonne-capacity haul trucks over it 24/7.

By February of 2003, CRC’s parent company, Luscar, had merged with its rival, Fording Coal (the main company operating in the Crowsnest), and become part of the Elk Valley Coal Partnership. Elk Valley was also controlled by the multinationals Consol, Sherritt International and Teck Cominco—and, strangely enough, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Nearly all the coal mines in western Canada had been amalgamated into a monopoly.

That monopoly soon ran up against another one, the Canadian Pacific Railway, in a court fight over shipping rates and delivery delays due to snow slides and forest fires. The CPR was Elk Valley’s only mode of transport from its Crowsnest Pass mines. Elk Valley needed to reassure its customers that it could get sufficient coal to market via another railway. That railway was CNR, which served the mines around Hinton.

Then, along came a jolt of economic electricity sufficient to get Frankenmine up off the table and walking: the price of coking coal skyrocketed. An unexpected boom in Asian steelmaking, coupled with insufficient supply in both coking coal and the ships to move it, set off a surge of coal orders worldwide, driving prices up. In the latter half of 2003 the price climbed from US$40 per tonne to $70. It kept rising, reaching $80 in June 2004 and $122 by April 2005.

By March 2004, Elk Valley had marshalled the bulldozers and was hard at work on the haul road. A lot of rock beside the McLeod River was moved in a hell of a hurry. So were the regulators.

In September, the federal government came up with the remaining permit required to begin mining (never mind the Migratory Birds Convention Act now), and by mid-October, when I scraped up enough money to charter a helicopter to fly over the valley (the public road had been closed all summer), the seam was open. The first trainload of coal went to Vancouver shortly after.

We conservationists didn’t take this lying down. Such flagrant corporate/regulatory-agency duplicity was third-world stuff! The original coalition, joined by the Sierra Club of Canada, went after both levels of government to hold proper hearings on what was, in our view, a vastly different mine design. We were refused. Industry clearly had the ear of the regulators, while we didn’t. Never mind that we were the only ones standing up for the interests of all Albertans, whose public land was getting wrecked, plus the interests of the grizzly bears and other wildlife. The government was listening only to people who were making a buck off the place.

Our coalition took the government to court over egregious failings in the panel decision. And we won. But all we got was another short hearing, leading to another Cheviot approval.

Well, I had been making a buck off the place for many years too, in my guiding activities, and had been recognized as an independent member of the coalition throughout the earlier hearings. So I decided to get standing before the Alberta Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) to make a case that Alberta Environment had approved the haul road in error. Not accountable to Alberta Environment or any other government department, the EAB was formed in 1993 to give us Davids a chance against the many Goliaths in the province. As far as corporate Alberta was concerned, the EAB was okay: it gave the government credibility, and the board only had the power to send its findings to the Minister of Environment, who could accept or reject them.

There was a risk in going before the EAB: if my appeal was found to be without merit I could be hit with the legal costs incurred by Elk Valley and Alberta Environment. I proceeded with the appeal. Meanwhile the rest of the coalition backed Sierra Legal in two Federal Court cases, one demanding a full environmental review and another on behalf of the migratory birds.

The board gave me standing, Elk Valley protested, which resulted in a short preliminary hearing in Edmonton in April of 2004, which affirmed my standing, Elk Valley then moved against that affirmation, which resulted in the judge throwing their case out. All this only delayed the actual EAB hearing while Elk Valley continued to fill those big haul trucks.

It was late January 2005 before the appeal was heard, in Hinton, in the same hotel in which the 1997 and 2000 Cheviot hearings had been held. Our crew was small but determined: Klimek, wilderness advocate Dianne Pachal, Pembina Institute selenium-chaser Chris Severson-Baker, wildlife biologist Dr. Cleve Wershler, and a fan of the region named Tom Stang, who presented photos of what the upper McLeod Valley looked like before the haul road was built. A group of cottage owners in Cadomin also weighed in, reminding the panel that they’d been promised unfettered access to CRC’s reclaimed mining areas, now isolated on the far side of the haul road. All these folks did a lot of work for no pay, and we held our own against a battery of expensive lawyers and consultants brought in by Alberta Environment and Elk Valley Coal.

The EAB wouldn’t consider actually closing the mine. We were allowed only to argue that the haul road had been approved in error. The best we could hope for was a recommendation that the minister close the haul road and make Elk Valley get its coal down the valley another way.

We waited 11 weeks for the decision. On April 12, 2005, Alberta Environment Minister Guy Boutilier announced that Elk Valley would have to avoid putting salt on the haul road (salting attracts wildlife), train the haul-truck drivers to avoid collisions with grizzly bears and other charismatic creatures, and install side-lighting on the trucks. The company also had to ensure the haul road was not used by Hinton’s go-everywhere 4×4 crowd when the mine was not operating. The EAB report detailed a lot of other equally minor mitigations that wouldn’t cause the company any real trouble. None of this recognized the loss of the valley to eco-recreationists or Cadomin cottage owners.

At least we’d made them blink. They would have to report to the Cadomin cottage owners and me on the progress of these token mitigations. But beyond standing in front of the trucks on the haul road, an act sure to land me in jail, if not in the Jasper cemetery, there was nothing further I could do about Cheviot.

Now it’s up to Sierra Legal, who took the case to Federal Court in Edmonton on June 14. The judge could shut down the mine. Environmental justice has a way of occasionally winning out in this country’s legal system, if not in its regulatory bodies. It is through such victories, and they are few, that rapacious capitalists are sometimes taught that Canada is not as easy to plunder as they assumed. But the case could drag on for years, while Mountain Park steadily becomes paradise lost.

Ironically, the coal market itself may save at least some of the area. A highly respected coal-market analyst estimates the current coking-coal boom will last about five years, depending on the economy. Elk Valley Coal and their competitors in other countries know this, and they’re doing their best to sell as much coal to Asia as they can before the boom ends. The result will almost certainly be a glutted market and nose-diving prices. Then Cheviot and other Canadian Rockies mines will close, perhaps for good, as steelmakers retool with newer iron-smelting technology, leaving a lot of people out of work and “We Support Cheviot” signs mouldering in Hinton basements.

The lesson in all this is a scary one: Alberta’s mining industry is capable of overcoming any opposition and spoiling any place it wishes, including lands as beautiful and ecologically important as Mountain Park. Our province needs a government able to enact truly protective laws and willing to enforce them. It needs regulators with backbone.

For now, they’re only in my dreams.

Ben Gadd is a Jasper-based author and naturalist.

The post Fighting Frankenmine appeared first on Alberta Views.

Large pools killed hundreds in coal mines around the world, including Alberta, leaving mangled, barely identifiable bodies for weeping widows to identify. Often the force of the explosion would shoot bodies from the mouths of mine shafts like bullets.

These deadly accidents don’t seem to have any link to Woodlands County, a bucolic north-central Alberta community which prides itself on its fur trade roots and its serene wilderness. But fire damp, known today as coalbed methane, is still capable of sparking apprehension along the quiet back roads among farmers and landowners whose hands may have cleared acres of forest but have never been blackened by coal dust.

Like the youngest, neglected sister in a fairytale, coalbed methane was long shunned and ignored in favour of its more glittering and better behaved siblings—conventional oil, natural gas and the oilsands, which have consistently produced riches for Alberta for decades. Coalbed methane is formed through a process called “coalification,” which converts plant matter into coal over millions of years. Instead of being trapped in the pore spaces of rock, like most conventional natural gas, coalbed methane is attached to the coal itself. Pressure from the overlying rock or any water in the coal seam keeps the methane in place. Producers can coax the methane out only by reducing the pressure. Sometimes this means fracturing the coal seams. Most times it means pumping the water out of the seams. Almost always, it requires more work than conventional natural gas does, so it’s easy to understand why it was shunned.

Coalbed methane was looked at in the late 1980s and early ’90s, but gas prices were low and pipelines were chock full of conventional natural gas. Now the situation has changed dramatically. Natural gas prices are high—high enough to force rebates from the provincial government—and conventional natural gas supplies are petering out. The Alberta Energy and Utilities Board reports that gas production peaked in 2001 and has dropped over the last two years, despite a furious rate of activity that saw a new gas well drilled nearly every hour last year. The province is under pressure to continue its high production rate. Ninety-four per cent of all gas Americans import comes from Canada, and their appetite increases annually. A group of Alberta industry and government geoscientists, the Canadian Gas Potential Committee, says it doubts Canada will be able to meet domestic and U.S. demand beyond 2014 with current resources. We need to “aggressively pursue” other supplies of gas, including coalbed methane, to give us time to cut back on gas use and develop energy alternatives, the committee says.

The Alberta Geological Survey estimated recently that Alberta’s coal seams, which sweep the entire province all the way up to Grande Prairie and in a sloping line across to Lloydminster, hold 500 trillion cubic feet of methane, though the survey did not hazard a guess as to how much of that could be pumped out at a profit. A cubic foot of natural gas is about the same as the volume of air required to fill a basketball. One trillion cubic feet is enough to fuel most of Canada’s gas-heated homes for two years.

Even one-tenth of the estimated supply of coalbed methane would out- strip remaining conventional natural gas supplies. It’s not surprising, then, that the oilpatch has thrown itself into pursuing this long-neglected resource with newfound enthusiasm. Provincial Energy Minister Murray Smith says it could be “the oilsands of natural gas.” In 2002, fewer than 50 coalbed methane wells were drilled in Alberta. This number has ballooned to about 1,000 and Smith predicts it will rise to 15,000 in the next few years.

In Woodlands County, coalbed methane development announced its arrival when a landman knocked on Irene and Floyd Olson’s door four kilometres northwest of Fort Assiniboine in 2001.

Sitting at her kitchen table, with a view of hulking bulls out one window and the suspense of farm cats watching chickadees out another, Irene recalls their first impressions of the landman’s proposal to have a coalbed methane well drilled on their land.

“I thought, ‘Oh, this will be all right. It will be one well, we’ll get a little money from it and maybe they won’t stay too long.’ Mm-mm, wrong,” the 60-year-old says with a rueful shake of her head. “Because now they tell us they’re applying to the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board to increase the number of wells per section.”

That’s typical of methane development. The gas is at a lower pressure than conventional gas, so more wells are required per section of land. Often as many as eight wells per section are needed. For farmers unaccustomed to oilpatch activity, this smacks of a waste of good land.

While Floyd, 64, rumbles a tractor through the farm yard, Irene extols the virtues of the area’s “grey wooded.” Grey wooded is a type of soil, though the way Irene savours the words you’d think it was a vintage of wine. Woodlands County is blessed with a thick layer of this type of soil. “When there’s moisture here, it’s really good land,” Irene says. “So farmers hate to lose acres of it to a gas well site. It’s galling for them to have to steer their tractors around a well pad.”

Irene also misses the lost tranquility of her farm. “I didn’t expect the development to be of this size,” she says. “That means the extra traffic on the road, the pipelines, the interruptions to our way of living and to our nice quiet corner.” She points outside to the pen containing their seven “rascal” bulls. “Before, the only things to disturb us would be our crazy bulls or our neighbour’s dog, which would come for a visit once in a while.” Now methane-related trucks regularly roar by on the road beside their farm.

Beyond the increased noise, the extra traffic kicks up clouds of dust. Irene and Floyd paid to have the road in front of their driveway oiled. The company working on her land oiled another 150-metre stretch of the road leading to her place. They did it without having to be asked.

“I thought, ‘Oh, this will be all right. It will be one well, we’ll get a little money from it and maybe they won’t stay too long.’ Mm-mm, wrong.” —Irene Olson

In fact, Irene has few harsh words to say about Trident, Nexen and Red Willow, the three companies digging wells in the county. They even tested her well water before and after they drilled the well closest to her house. “I was quite glad of it because we only have one well,” Irene says, “and for 250 head of cattle and two coffee drinkers it would have been stressful not to have water.”

Water can be a major problem.

An Alberta activist group called the Butte Action Committee brought in visitors from Wyoming and Colorado who told stories about lemonade that could be lit on fire and tap water that looked like milk and fizzed like Alka- Seltzer. Sounds like the work of a mad scientist, but the Americans said it’s caused when methane seeps into aquifers after drilling.

Some U.S. farmers were also astonished when drillers used a process called “fracing” to release methane from coal seams, turning the water from their adjacent wells black. And they say productive farm land turned into hardpan after gas companies flooded nearby land with water drained from coalbed methane wells. As is common here in Alberta, farmers in Wyoming and Colorado learned they didn’t own the rights to the minerals beneath their land. Soon the activities of energy-hungry companies in relatively regulation-free Wyoming turned a methane-rich area called the Powder River Basin into a powder keg.

Conservative ranchers found themselves suddenly relating to radical environmentalists as they watched their range land get chewed up by tightly spaced well pads, road networks and sprawling containment lagoons for up to 77,000 litres per day of wastewater from each well. A recent study found that half of the water pumped from wells finds its way into the basin’s streams and that it could lead to the elimination of 20 to 30 species from those streams. But ranchers are even more concerned about their livelihood. One rancher in Wyoming, the inspiration for the novel The Horse Whisperer, won an $800,000 (u.s.) lawsuit this year against a company that ran roughshod over his ranch.

The situation is similar in Colorado. “The road cuts wildlife habitat to ribbons,” state resident Mark Harvey wrote in the High Country News. “Extracting salty water from the deep aquifers and bringing it to the surface ruins good soils and clean sources of surface water. An area that was once a wild meadow or prairie now looks like an industrial park.”

In Alberta, years of drought have made farmers sensitive to these kinds of stories. But drought, coupled with the crushing mad cow crisis, has also opened up land to development. “We’re getting to the age where we’d like to cut down on the number of cattle, but there’s no place for them to go,” Irene says. The couple gets $1,200 per year for each well on their land. “Everyone assures me you can’t make that amount of money by farming that land,” she says, caught between financial and ecological concern.

While their hearts may tell them to hold out, the practical need for Alberta farmers to feed their families and hold on to land that may have been in their family for generations opens countless gates for gas compa- nies. Irene and Floyd were among the first in the area to profit from coalbed methane. “That’s when all the coffee shop gang started calling Floyd J.R. and Jed Clampett,” she says. They never expected five wells, though, with more to come. “I don’t think we had a choice, to tell you the truth. I think they were coming anyway.” Why put up with the noise, dust and traffic from the development on neighbouring farms and not get any of the profits yourself, she says. “But if I had my druthers, I’d rather they were in some other county.”

A tour around the block of Irene’s neighbourhood, so to speak, reveals coalbed methane activity at just about every crossroads. Down the road from her farm, sections of yellow pipe line up across a field in orderly single file, waiting to be tucked under the earth. At intervals on either side of the road, patches of scraped, raw earth are flanked by ramparts of topsoil. These are future well sites.

Irene stops her truck at an intersection and points out an orange backhoe scooping gravel out of a ridge that will be used at well sites. “Now this,” she says, shaking her head, “is ugly.”

The reaction is equally mixed that evening in a community hall in Tiger Lily, not far from the Olson farm. Farmers shuffle past posterboards set up on easels describing the coalbed methane process, then settle in around lacquered table tops, enjoying free coffee and squares.

Coalbed methane could be the oilsands of natural gas. In 2002, there were fewer than 50 wells in Alberta. Now it’s 1,000 and it could rise to 15,000 predicts Energy Minister Murray Smith.

About a dozen Nexen and Trident staff work the room, answering questions from the 40 or so people who show up. It’s not their first open house. The companies are taking pains to distance themselves from the stories imported from the u.s. “Alberta is not Wyoming,” one posterboard declares, listing the regulations companies must follow in Alberta. So far, Trident has sunk 60 wells and $30-million into the area and has yet to start commercial production, according to Dan Bartsch, a Trident production manager. “But that’s ok,” he says, “because as we’ve seen in basins in the U.S., it takes a long time to produce economic quantities of gas.”

The companies know that while they calculate how many wells they need and how productive the area is, it makes sense to keep the communities happy, to become part of the community. “We have open houses every six months to let them know what’s changing,” says Don Seely, a Trident drilling manager. They address rumours, answer questions and try to keep locals in the loop. Their message is that coalbed methane is a safe, lucrative business for the community.

Not all are convinced. “I’d just as soon they don’t come make a mess on my property,” says Marvin Kruschel, 72, peering skeptically at a posterboard. “It’s a nuisance to have to farm around those well pads.” For the most part, however, people at the meeting seem quite content with the companies. Richard Hillmer works for a business that cements the wells. Trident even demands they put tarps down on the land before they cement, he says. “Their expectations of contractors are way above other large companies,” he says. “The only negative comments we hear about it are from farmers living next door, and they say, ‘We’ll be happy when they put a well on my property.’”

Farmers further south are just as hungry for the money. MGV Energy Inc., a pioneer of the coalbed methane industry in Alberta, has been very busy in the Beiseker area, a town that boasts Squirt the skunk as its mascot and proclaims itself the cross- roads to the future.

The land here is almost entirely cleared and agricultural, but also had little drilling on it until recently. mgv now has 85 wells producing methane and another 20 wells in various stages of drilling. All the wells tap into what’s called the Horseshoe Canyon zone, one of six coal-bearing formations in the province that have methane potential. “For the most part, people were open to having wells drilled on their land,” says MGV’s 43-year-old operations manager Gord Robinson, while downing a bacon and egg sandwich at Beiseker’s Apple Pie Café.

“We have had to do a lot of talking to accommodate neighbours, but that’s ok,” adds Michael Gatens, 46, the MGV CEO who speaks with a slight southern drawl stemming from his West Virginia roots. Gatens is also chairman of the Canadian Society of Unconventional Gas, a group which formed in April 2002 to support the exploration and development of all kinds of unconventional gas resources, including coalbed methane.

Last year, the company held an open house to let people know they were applying to the AEUB to drill up to eight wells on each section of land. The negotiations with landowners have taken a year so far and are still ongoing. Landowners can get $2,500 per year per well. For someone who has eight wells on a section, that works out to $20,000 per year.

Despite the talk of coalbed methane’s heavy “footprint” on the land— that is, the amount of land taken up by roads and well pads—farmers will ignore options that could save precious farm land but cost them money. Directional drilling allows several wells to stretch out underground from a single pad. “Landowners will get snarky with us if we say we want to drill directionally,” Gatens says. Farmers are paid according to how much land is disturbed. The company will pay for two to three acres, even though the final well uses a much smaller space.

Gord Robinson drives his truck right up to a well. The pressure gauges are the highest point of the well at 120 centimetres. A small fence measuring six metres by six metres encloses the well. Robinson points out how it angles in—“because otherwise the cows like to rub against them.” Farmers are losing little land around the well, he says.

Noisy and busier, compressor stations are less comfortable to live beside than a regular well. But they’re a necessary part of the coalbed methane industry, because of the lower gas pressure. The MGV compressor station holds two large compressors, two backhoes, a black water storage tank, an office building, a dehydrator and large reels of black plastic pipe. If the company decides to develop eight wells per section, they will likely add one or two compressors to the site, Robinson says.

Each compressor roars like a small jet engine, despite its specially designed walls to absorb sound. In the u.s., compressor stations have liter- ally driven people insane with their noise, prompting one man to plug the machines with bullets. Not a scenario MGV wants to see here.

As always, though, it’s water that resurfaces as the number one issue in the Beiseker area. Michael Gatens’s father-in-law farms in the area. “The number one question he asks anyone who wants to drill on his land is, ‘Is it going to affect my water well?’” Gatens says.

If anyone could answer that question, it would probably be József Tóth. The desk in his University of Alberta office is covered in papers full of swirling blue arrows. They depict the underground flow of water in his native Hungary. Tóth calls it his retirement project. He’s already had an illustrious career, most recently winning an award from the National Ground Water Association for major contributions to the field of ground water science.

Part of Tóth’s contribution to Albertans was to map all of the province’s groundwater. Altogether, Tóth and his team at the Alberta Research Council produced 47 colourful maps crammed with details about the groundwater in each area. They show how much water could be pulled out of the ground in an area, if it was freshwater or saline water, what other elements it contained, what sort of geology it was found in and at least a dozen other details. Tóth’s long career has taught him that you can’t just assume how aquifers will react to changes in flows around them. A person would have to be armed with specific details of each site to figure out how a coalbed methane well would affect the aquifers in an area, he says. There is no generic answer to how a particular aquifer and other aquifers near it will react to being pumped. “There could be absolutely no effect,” says Tóth, “or there could be an immediate effect.”

Like an enormous trifle, the earth under our feet is divided into layers of water (aquifers) and layers and mixtures of rock, sand or shale (aquitards). These aquitards usually keep the layers of water, which can vary significantly in saltiness and other chemical characteristics, from mixing. But if you change the pressure under- neath, that could change, Tóth warns. “There is no such thing as an absolute seal between aquifers,” he says.

Even pumping salty water from great depths can affect the freshwater above it, depending on the types of rock between the two layers of water, the distance between the layers and the rate at which you are pumping, he says. “You’ve got to know your system before you start to manipulate it.”

The latest report from the Alberta Geological Survey agrees that we need to proceed with caution. The society did a few aquifer tests in the Alberta Plains region. “These tests suggest producing water from these aquifers initiates flow from the aquifers, flow across aquifer/aquitard boundaries and potentially flow from surface water bodies,” the report reads. “These connections became evident under relatively low flow conditions when compared to production rates that would be associated with coalbed methane development.”

Each compressor roars like a small jet engine, despite its specially designed walls to absorb sound. In the U.S., compressor stations have literally driven people insane.

These words of caution echo what has already been said by the Pembina Institute for Appropriate Development. An exhaustive report compiled primarily by Mary Griffiths, an institute policy analyst, suggested all major coalbed methane developments should undergo environmental impact assessments before they are allowed to proceed. The Pembina report predicts methane projects will gobble up more land than conventional natural gas because they need more wells. And the report suggests there could be problems with water, venting, flaring and noise pollution from compressors.

Griffiths says she still does not know exactly what percentage of wells drilled so far are producing freshwater because companies are granted a one-year data confidentiality period on experimental wells for competitive reasons. The Pembina’s report only served to increase the chorus of voices coming from rural Alberta demanding that government keep careful control of the companies working with methane. The ripples of concern, when combined, were enough to rock the provincial government into action.

Earlier this year, they announced a series of public consultations and set up working groups to come up with recommendations on water, air, tenure and royalty issues. In early spring, consultations were held in Pincher Creek, Strathmore, Stettler, Rocky Mountain House, Wetaskiwin and Barrhead, all areas where coalbed methane activity is expected or already underway.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has already published its view on its website. The association says the AEUB should speed up the approval process and be more critical about whether or not someone objecting to an application will really be affected by the project. They also want the government to figure out a way to allow freshwater produced in a coalbed methane project to be used rather than reinjected.

All of this contrasts with the cautious approach advocated by the Pembina Institute. When Energy Minister Murray Smith announced plans to study the regulations around coalbed methane, he said he wanted government and industry to “get it right.”

“We want to learn from the experiences of other regions,” he said, “and from the wells that have been drilled so far in Alberta, to promote responsible, sustainable development.”

There are communities full of rural Albertans who really hope he means what he says.

Hanneke Brooymans covers environmental issues for the Edmonton Journal.

The post Coal Front appeared first on Alberta Views.