page_title: Environmental issues in Alberta
section_title: Oil sands emissions
hierarchical_section_title: Environmental issues in Alberta / The oil and gas sector / Oil sands emissions
caption_attribution_description: Syncrude's Mildred Lake plant in the Athabasca Oil Sands of Alberta, Canada
context_page_description: The Canadian province of Alberta faces a number of environmental issues related to natural resource extraction—including gas and oil industry with its oils sands—endangered species, melting glaciers, floods and droughts, wildfires, and global climate change. While the oil and gas industries generates substantial economic wealth, the Athabasca oil sands, which are situated almost entirely in Alberta, are the "fourth most carbon intensive on the planet behind Algeria, Venezuela and Cameroon" according to an August 8, 2018 article in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's journal Science.
  According to the 2019 report Canada's Changing Climate Report, which was commissioned by Environment and Climate Change Canada, Canada's annual average temperature over land has warmed by 1.7 C since 1948. The rate of warming is even higher in Canada's North, in the Prairies and northern British Columbia.
context_section_description: The Athabasca oil sands, which are situated almost entirely in Alberta, are the "fourth most carbon intensive on the planet behind Algeria, Venezuela and Cameroon" according to an August 8, 2018 article in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's journal Science. Their research concluded that "Canada's rating was nearly twice the global average".
  Scientists from Environment Canada and Queen's University published their research in the January 2013 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal (PNAS) in which they described innovative methods to measure the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in core samples from lakes including a remote lake, Namur Lake, which is situated 50 km from the sampling site, AR6, on the Athabasca River, and had a "high atmospheric PAH deposition. They found that the sedimentary profiles from the core samples revealed "striking PAH trajectories" that "reflect the decades-long impacts of oil sands development on lake ecosystems, including remote Namur Lake. This temporal PAH pattern was not recognized previously by industry-funded oil sands monitoring programs."
  The Alberta's oil sands "emit high levels of air pollutants" based on a May 25, 2016 article entitled "Oil sands operations as a large source of secondary organic aerosols" in Nature in June 2016 by lead author John Liggio and a team of Environment Canada scientists. Oil sands greenhouse gas emissions are the largest "anthropogenic secondary organic aerosols in North America". The Environment Canada researchers defined secondary organic aerosols (SOAs) as "gases and particles that interact with sunlight in complex ways and that are released by both the globe’s plant matter as well as fossil-burning machines and industries". According to the article in La Verge, citing Environment Canada researchers, emissions from the oil sands "equal what's produced by the entire city of Toronto". The scientists from Environment Canada said that Alberta oil sands greenhouse gas emissions may be much higher than the four main mines were reporting. For example, Suncor’s mine was 13 per cent higher than it reported, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.'s Horizon and Jackpine mines were about 37 per cent more, and Syncrude's Mildred Lake mine (MLSB) emitted 2 1/4 times more than they reported to the federal pollutant registry.
  Their "data from airborne measurements over the bitumen-producing region in August 2013 found that oilsands production generates at least 45 to 84 tonnes per day of the tiny particulate matter."
  According to the University of Calgary's Joule Bergerson, a co-author of an August 31, 2018 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)-funded Science article entitled "Global carbon intensity of crude oil production", "if oil-producing countries adopted regulations similar to Canada's that limit the amount of gas flared or vented into the air, it could cut greenhouse gas emissions from oil production by almost a quarter."
caption: Syncrude's Mildred Lake plant (MLSB) in the Athabasca oil sands
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