OTTAWA—Canadian environmental authorities on Monday charged Syncrude in the death of 500 migrating ducks that landed in its oil sands sewage ponds in western Canada.

The waterfowl died after being coated in April 2008 with toxic oil residue from an Alberta mine left behind in the ponds by Syncrude Canada Limited, the world’s largest producer of synthetic crude oil from oil sands.

Officials allege Syncrude did not use noise makers designed to scare birds from the contaminated ponds and did not immediately report the ducks’ demise, as required by law.

“This was the single largest reported incident of oiled birds in the oil-sands region,” Environment Canada said in a statement. The Alberta government called it “an environmental tragedy.”

“We are protective of our environment, of ducks, of conservation in this country,” said Environment Minister Jim Prentice. “We have laws. We expect them to be abided by and there will be consequences for people who don’t live up to the full extent of the Canadian conservation environmental laws.”

Syncrude said it has cooperated with the investigation and “continues to treat the matter very seriously.”

A cold snap, it said, had delayed the deployment of noise makers last spring.

The company faces a maximum fine of 800,000 Canadian dollars ($655,000) and six months in jail for directors, under Canada’s Migratory Birds Convention Act and the Alberta Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act.

The Aurora North Site mine, 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Fort McMurray, is operated by Syncrude. It is owned by a joint venture that includes ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil and Petro-Canada.

A first court appearance is set for March 25 in Fort McMurray.

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What could beat Amazonian deforestation, massive coal plants next to elementary schools, factory farming, mountaintop removal, and giant trash heaps in the middle of the ocean for the title of "the most destructive project on Earth"? [PDF]

Cue the tar sands, a vast expanse of the Albertan province opened up to rampant drilling, surface mining, and pipelines through what was once a strikingly beautiful section of the Canadian boreal forest. Canada's Environmental Defense deemed it "the most destructive project on Earth" last February.

While this region holds immense ecological and aesthetic value on the planetary exterior (it is the largest remaining unspoiled forest and wetland ecosystem and one of the most biodiverse carbon sinks on Earth), its subterranean layers are rich with oil that is deeply embedded in an earth and sand mixture called bitumen. Starting to imagine what this project might look like?

Some have likened it to Mordor, the fictional land ravaged by the Dark Lord in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Huge swathes of forest -- the tar sands developments are visible from space -- have been leveled to mine the earth, make way for processing facilities, and provide space for tailing ponds. The projects strain the freshwater capacity from the Athabasca River, and the downstream pollution is linked, some believe, to rising cancer rates in indigenous communities.

The world's leading oil and gas companies are salivating over Alberta's tar sands, thanks to record oil prices for much of 2008 and declining access to the fossil fuel resources in countries like Russia and Venezuela. Alberta is estimated to be home to 60 percent of the world's more easily accessed oil reserves.

The pipe dream of North American oil independence has spurred a gold rush to this fossil fuel playground. A who's who of Western oil companies comprises the all-star lineup of tar sands players -- Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil, Shell, BP, Syncrude, Statoil, PetroCanada, and more. Unfortunately, tar sands drilling and mining has only just begun. Companies plan to spend as much as $125 billion to expand mining, drilling, and refining operations over the next 10 to 15 years. And neither the Canadian federal nor provincial governments have stepped up to the challenge of planning for the cumulative impact of all the development.

Alongside environmental watchdogs, shareholders are raising red flags and demanding that drillers move slowly and cautiously. In the U.S., our firms, Green Century Capital Management and Trillium Asset Management Corporation, two socially responsible investment companies, have been mobilizing at Chevron and ConocoPhillips. The Canadian mutual funds company Ethical Funds has engaged a number of Canadian oil and gas firms and produced several useful reports on the tar sands. Investors in the U.K. and Europe have been approaching BP and Shell.

Green Century and Trillium filed shareholder resolutions in 2008 at Chevron and ConocoPhillips, outlining key risks and asking the companies to report on environmental damage resulting from their expanding tar sands operations, including the implications of discontinuing expansion plans.

Athabasca tar sands.

Photo: katakanadian

Included in the laundry list of obvious risks to the companies, the investors noted impending costly regulations on carbon emissions in both Canada and the U.S. (the tar sands' largest customer); declining operational water availability; reputational damage due to impact on air quality, water quality, and wildlife; and the possibility of litigative and competitive threat.

In making our case to our fellow shareholders, Green Century and Trillium noted the particularly worrisome hazard surrounding tailing ponds from mining operations, acutely toxic pools of sludge that cover almost 20 square miles of forest and bogs. Last year, these nasty puddles were splashed across international headlines when an entire flock of 500 migrating ducks was found dead in one of Syncrude's massive tailing ponds.

Nearly 30 percent of both companies' shareholders supported the proposals presented by Green Century and Trillium. This is a very high vote in the rarefied world of shareholder proposals -- not quite a vote of no confidence, but a strong signal to executives that a critical minority of stockowners is not on board with the program.

Green Century and Trillium are now pursuing follow-up meetings with both companies to discuss last year's resolutions and the companies' plans to address investor concerns.

In the end, the tar sands are a textbook example of our failure as human beings to look beyond short-term profit maximization. In a rational global economy capable of looking to long-term rewards, we would now be enjoying the economic, political, and environmental benefits of two decades of aggressive efficiency measures, phased-down fossil-fuel use, and the mass distribution of renewable energy technologies.

Instead, we have new financial maelstroms threatening our economy every week, the "most destructive project on Earth" annihilating one of our planet's most valuable ecological resources, and ... hundreds of unnecessarily dead ducks.

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The richest and third-richest men in the world made a surprise visit to an oil-sands operation in the Canadian province of Alberta on Monday. Investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who are said to have a combined worth of $120 billion, "were exercising curiosity, basically saying, 'Wow, this is neat,'" says Greg Stringham of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. Buffett has recently said he is interested in investing in oil sands; he invests in American oil company ConocoPhillips, which owns significant oil sands assets. If the bigwigs are interested in investing in alternatives to conventional oil, we could suggest better energy sources than the environment-polluting, cancer-causing, duck-killing monstrosity that is the oil sands.

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As the United States expands its oil-refining capabilities, more than two-thirds of planned capacity will be devoted to processing crude oil from Canada's tar sands, says a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project and Environmental Defense Canada. Tar-sands capacity is predicted to see a total increase of 1.9 million barrels per day, says the report, while conventional-oil refining drops off. Production of tar-sands oil is cheaper and much dirtier than regular ol' crude: Greens lament the air-polluting nasties spewed by tar-sands operations, as well as encroachment on Canada's boreal forest. Emphasizing the tar sands as a fuel source is insanity, says EDC's Matt Price: "Nowhere else are we talking about ripping up an area the size of Florida, creating massive toxic lakes you can see from space with the naked eye, and giving off three times the greenhouse-gas emissions to produce oil when compared with conventional crude." Well, when you put it that way ...

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A clause in the recently passed U.S. energy bill could be interpreted to prevent the U.S. from sourcing fuel from Canada's oil sands, putting Canadian officials all in a tizzy. Section 526 of the Energy Independence and Security Act prohibits the U.S. government from purchasing alternative fuels with higher lifecycle greenhouse-gas emissions than conventional petroleum. It's a descriptor that seems to fit oil sands, which have traditionally been classified as an alternative fuel and can produce up to five times more carbon emissions than conventional oil production. But in response to Canada's fears that the rule "could unnecessarily complicate the integrated Canada-U.S. energy relationship," the U.S. government is considering reclassifying oil sands as conventional fuel. Because, really, enabling extra climate-destroying emissions is far preferable to pissing off the Canucks.

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A Canadian federal court has ruled in favor of environmental groups that sued in opposition to a massive planned oil-sands mine in Alberta. The 120-square-mile strip mine had recently been approved by a joint federal-provincial panel that found the project's estimated annual greenhouse-gas emissions of 3.7 million tons to be insignificant. Yet no justification was given for the finding. "The panel dismissed as insignificant the greenhouse-gas emissions without any rationale," the judge wrote, ruling that the panel must justify its conclusion. Environmentalists hoped the ruling would force stricter reviews of similar projects in the future. If it's ultimately approved, the mine could produce 300,000 barrels of oil sands a day.

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