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The Flea Trap / Re: Study finds little environmental impact from oil sands
October 17, 2012, 05:58:01 PM #3
The Flea Trap / Re: Study finds little environmental impact from oil sands
October 17, 2012, 05:54:14 PMwhat is this ???......some kind of sick joke...who is this imposter??? :arrow:Quote from: "Obvious Li"
I'm not an Imposter.
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The Flea Trap / Study finds little environmental impact from oil sands
October 17, 2012, 05:44:44 PMIn 2010, a single oil-sands operation run by Suncor Energy released into the atmosphere 28,940 tonnes of volatile organic compounds, 22,210 tonnes of sulphur dioxide and 14,011 tonnes of particulate matter.
With those three types of substances combined, Suncor emitted into the air pollutants equivalent in weight to nearly 4,800 city buses – and the company operates just one of several mines sprawling across the landscape north of Fort McMurray, Alta.
Yet when scientists drilled into lake bottoms 200 kilometres from those oil-sands mines, they discovered something surprising: At that distance, levels of those pollutants were negligible. In fact, the lake sediments, whose layers opened a window onto hundreds of years of air and water quality, showed that in many ways those lakes are cleaner today than they were decades, and even centuries, ago.
"It's still, by and large, a natural landscape," said Roland Hall, a University of Waterloo professor of biology and one of the lead researchers on the new study.
Communities downstream of the oil sands, such as Fort Chipewyan, have long pointed the finger at oil-sands operations for sullying water, fish and people with toxins.
But, Dr. Hall said, the level of pollutants travelling by air and water to a place like Fort Chipewyan are not high enough to merit the concern that has been expressed. Instead, he said, "the conclusion in our paper is that natural sources of PACs" – polycyclic aromatic compounds – "via the water continue to be a main process that's delivering them."
In other words, toxins well downstream of the oil sands come from the environment, not big steel stacks – a finding that suggests the industrial impact on the environment is largely local, rather than broadly regional.
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