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Dr. George Dixon

Seeking sustainability in Alberta’s oil sands

George Dixon, Waterloo’s vice-president, university research, is leading a collective effort by 20 professors and their teams from seven universities and Environment Canada (including 10 profs from Waterloo) in a bid to meet the environmental challenge of the Alberta oil sands industry.

Photo of George Dixon in the lab

Dixon is a biology professor with an international reputation as an eco-toxicologist. For the past 15 years he’s been studying the ecological impact of by-products from the Alberta oil sands, which contain the second largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia’s.

The oil — thick bitumen mixed with sand and clay — is costly to extract, but increasingly worth it as oil prices rise. At the same time, the potential exists for contamination of the Athabasca River basin, one of Canada’s largest watersheds.

For each barrel of oil produced, there are also six to seven barrels of “tailings” — oily sand, clay, and water, laced with contaminants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and naphthenic acids (NAs). The tailings are dumped into pits as a temporary storage method.

Dixon and his multidisciplinary team are monitoring contaminant levels and effects on aquatic organisms in waters near mining operations. Another concern is to map the pathways these contaminants could follow in groundwater.

Over the next 30 years, more than 30 lakes hundreds of hectares in size will be created by diverting stored tailings to mined-out areas, which will then be capped with clean water. The first lake will be flooded in 2011. The next step will be to monitor the created lakes, to see whether natural chemical and biological processes transform them into healthy ecosystems.

The goal will be to connect these created lakes, once they’ve matured, with streams and rivers, and to reintegrate them with the watershed,” Dixon says. “The idea is to end with a self-managing system.”