Oil Sands Keeping An Eye On Program 101|Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance – COSIA

Ole Mrklas is the Director of Monitoring at COSIA. He represents industry partners in the Oil Sands Monitoring (OSM) Program, North America’s largest environmental monitoring program. We overtook Ole to discover out more about this big however little-known Canadian ecological initiative.

Q: What is the Oil Sands Monitoring Program?
A: The program examines the cumulative results of oil sands advancement in the area with information from 1,095 different sites. It keeps track of the potential ecological impact of oil sands advancement through particular ambient air quality, regional surface water and groundwater quality and quantity measurements in the Athabasca, Peace and Cold Lake systems. It likewise keeps an eye on the biodiversity of the natural habitat, including wetlands, evaluating wildlife and plant modifications that result from oil sands advancement. The criteria for testing are established by the program members and partners.

All the information is gathered up into reports, scientific papers and presentations that are released on a regular schedule and freely available to anybody online. Far, the program has delivered about 700 of these files. You can see some of them here.

Q: What is special about this tracking program?
A: It’s a multi-partner and multi-stakeholder program co-led by the governments of Canada and Alberta that’s extremely uncommon! Provincial and federal leaders work alongside the oil sands market, regulator, NGOs and communities in the oil sands area, including 18 native communities. Each representative supplies input into the program’s governance and the kinds of scientific information that are collected, weaving western science with indigenous understanding for a fulsome understanding of environmental concerns.

This partnership is constructed on partnerships and trust, guaranteeing that the program is both extensive in scope and scale, and thinks about any top priorities that communities raise. It’s been an extremely effective design.

Q: Why is the Oil Sands Monitoring Program crucial for Canadians?
A: This program is crucial because if you are going to take care of something as important as our boreal forest environment– an unique environment and a national resource– on a regional scale, you require to be able to keep an eye on and determine it so that you can base your decisions on noise, clinical data, and standard methods of understanding the environment.

Q: What makes you enthusiastic about it?
A: The truth that this program has a lot of stakeholders and participants involved is its strength– everybody is working towards a common objective of regional ecological guarantee. That’s the exciting part for me. This program guarantees Canadians in a transparent way that oil sands advancement is being done properly. It helps the public be better notified about the prospective ecological impacts of oil sands advancement on the area and makes the data easily available.

Q: Who does the monitoring?
Tracking is carried out by federal and provincial companies, independent 3rd celebrations, and market participants.

Q: Has the program identified any environmental concerns so far?
A: In its nine years the program has actually not seen any major modifications in the area’s air, water or land as the result of oil sands development. While some impurities and changes (footprint) identified have actually been shown to originate from the oil sands industry, other contaminants are the outcome of further human activities in the region and natural direct exposure of bitumen (belonging to the location) to the environment (riverbanks and rivers) through disintegration. To date, the combined levels of these contaminants and changes have actually not been revealed to have a negative environmental influence on the location.

Q: When was the program developed?
A: A number of smaller sized regional tracking programs were combined in 2012 to create the Oil Sands Monitoring Program. The effort was led by the Alberta provincial government and the federal government as part of continuous efforts to guarantee the oil sands continued to be developed in an accountable and sustainable method. It is totally moneyed by the oil sands market.
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