CNRL was fined $278K after hundreds of birds died in a tailings ****pond****. Now it has launched an appeal, 411 birds died when an island formed in mining-contaminated water by Wallis Snowdon, CBC News, Feb 10, 2025
A major operator in Alberta’s oilsands is appealing a $278,000 regulatory fine it was issued after hundreds of birds died in one of its toxic tailings ****ponds****.
Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. was sanctioned last year by the Alberta Energy Regulator for not stopping the birds from nesting on an island that emerged from a ****pond**** at the Horizon oilsands mine, about 60 kilometres north of Fort McMurray.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2022, more than 400 California gulls died from exposure to the contaminated water.
CNRL was convicted of a single count under the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act for failing to safely contain the hazardous substances that are found in their tailings ****ponds****.
Six months since the fine was levied, the AER has now granted the Calgary-based company leave to appeal the sanction.
Critics say CNRL should take accountability for the environmental infractions.
‘The wrong message’
“It sends the wrong message,” said David Spink, an environmental consultant and former industry regulator with the Alberta government.
“There’s no question that the birds died and there’s no question that it was your facility that was responsible.”
In a statement to CBC News, AER said the sanction is eligible for an appeal under the regulations laid out in the Responsible Energy Development Act but a hearing date has not yet been set. CNRL declined to comment, citing the pending review.
Spink, who once served as a director of air and water approvals for Alberta, said the fine is small price to pay for an oil and gas giant such as CNRL. The Calgary-based operator reported a net income of $8.2 billion in 2023.
The appeal demonstrates that CNRL is unwilling to answer for its infractions, he said.
“They may not be eager to accept this blemish on their environmental record,” he said.
The contravention is among a string of mass bird deaths in the oilsands.
The high-profile landings prompted years of research and monitoring aimed at preventing flocks from dying in Alberta’s expanse of tailings ****ponds****.
The Athabasca oilsands are at the centre of a major migratory pathway for birds and protecting the species that fly over the region is a condition of licence for all oilsands producers.
A ‘standard of perfection’
CNRL has previously denied its negligence in the 2022 bird deaths. At the time, the company argued that it should not be held to a “standard of perfection” in its efforts to protect the birds.
The regulator in turn, ruled that CNRL did not take reasonable steps to prevent the deaths by failing to destroy the island before it became a nesting site.
Colleen Cassady St. Clair, a University of Alberta biologist and expert in bird deaths in the oilsands, said CNRL should have known that islands in tailings ****ponds**** were attractive to birds and posed a risk to passing flocks.
St. Clair was the lead researcher of the Research on Avian Protection Project, a three-year study that examined how to better protect birds in Alberta’s oilsands after 1,600 died at a Syncrude tailings ****pond**** in 2008.
She said the industrial hazards to birds have been well understood for decades.
Companies don’t give a shit, and AER helps maintain that mass murdering attitude, accumulate and freely dump toxic waste across Alberta, and illegally frac drinking water aquifers. Self regulation is intentionally created to fail at “regulating” to help billion dollar profit raping mostly foreign owned companies rape out more billions in profits.
“They had lots of warning,” she said. “They don’t have to be perfect, but they should be trying to absolutely minimize those mortalities.Pfff! Why!? AER helps companies break the law and then helps them get away with it, especially now that Dave Yager, good pal of Big Oil Dildo Danielle Smith, Premier of Corruption, was plunked corruptly on the board of ultra corrupt AER by Big Oil Dildo Danielle. He was also creepily involved with Dildo Danielle’s Extremely ignorant Wildrose Party before she betrayed it, crossed the floor. I fully expect Dildo D’s new and improved AER board will drop their fine completely, say sorry and praise CNRL to the heavens, and help it keep on mass murdering wildlife in the industry’s ever escalating lust for more money.
“It’s hard to see an argument that they couldn’t have anticipated this problem.”
The case dates back to the spring of 2022 when workers at the mine discovered birds on the island in an area known as Tar River Valley on the north side of the Horizon mine.
The island had taken shape the previous spring, at the centre of a tailings ****pond****, due to receding waters and re-emerged the following year.
Aaahhhh, that magical escape hatch word, “should.”
The corporate polluters’ best friend.
According to the CNRL’s formal bird protection protocols, such islands should be destroyed to prevent birds from touching down. But the company failed to act in this case.Standard oil and gas “Best Industry Practice!” Especially in Alberta.They considered the island low risk as birds had initially shown no interest.
The small stretch of land soon became a nesting and hatching site for colonies of birds.
By May 21, 2022, CNRL workers counted a single Canada goose nest and 271 California gull nests along its beaches.
The company informed the regulator on June 7, more than two weeks later. By then, CNRL reported that it had installed bird deterrents on the island, including pyrotechnics and rockets.
But the hazing efforts were unsuccessful. Each day, the gulls would disperse and land again.
On July 12, CNRL reported that between 60 and 70 California gull chicks had been discovered on the island, covered in oil.
As the weeks went on, workers kept finding carcasses and gull chicks fouled with bitumen. Predators including wolves and coyotes passed through the shallow water to hunt on the island, feeding on the contaminated flocks and flushing more birds into the toxic waters.
The situation continued until Aug. 4, when the surviving chicks were old enough to fly away.
According to the regulator, 411 birds died before the island was finally destroyed that September.
Even a light oiling can threaten their survival, interfering with their ability to eat, fly and protect themselves from the elements.
Soiled birds can become trapped in the thick liquid, often drowning from the weight on their feathers.
The toxic slurry found in tailings can not only make the birds sick, it can also prove toxic to other wildlife which consume them.
‘Evasion of responsibility’
The company argued that, due to the Migratory Bird Convention Act, there was little they could do once the nests were established.
St. Clair described that argument as “slippery” and said the findings of the AER investigation were clear.
“Many months of inaction is not consistent with an attitude of due diligence,” she said.
It’s hard to fathom why CNRL has launched an appeal and it will erode public confidence in the operator, she said.What public confidence? There is none in AER, or our courts. The public is not stupid like AER and Dildo Danielle wish we were.
“I think the public has some tolerance for mistakes, whether it’s this industry or any other industry, and less tolerance for evasion of responsibility.”Not really. The industry has been evading due diligence for decades, enabled by AER and politicians, and worse, further enabled by voters consistently and predictably always voting for corruption in their con gov’ts again and again and again. Nearly 20 years ago, after some of my public speaking events in Alberta, mothers of oilfield workers abruptly shut down eager Q & A’s, furious I dared speak publicly of Encana, AER and the Alberta gov’t’s aquifer-contaminating crimes and even more furious I filed a lawsuit against the employers of their saintly inhumane environment-destroying sons. The mothers couldn’t get me out the hall fast enough. Just ugly and sick, generations of demented cruelty against water, land, air and wildlife.
Refer also to:
Aerial photo of some of Alberta’s massive toxic waste lakes which industry, AER, media and NGOs call ****ponds****.
2024: What is a pond? And why is a formal definition important?
Photo of pond surrounded by trees, Lagunas de Montebello National Park, Mexico. Credit: AmericanWildlife / Getty Images
What is a pond? What is the difference between a pond, a lake, a wetland or a swamp? The question need no longer keep you up at night, as an international team of researchers have established the first data-driven pond definition.
“The lack of a universal pond definition causes a lot of confusion, from people wondering about the difference between a pond and a lake, to aquatic monitoring programs with different definitions across governmental agencies, even up to accurately modelling global carbon budgets,” says Dr Meredith Holgerson, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, US, and co-first author of a paper about the definition, published in Scientific Reports.
“We wanted to evaluate how scientists and policymakers define ponds, and examine whether ponds are functionally distinct from lakes and wetlands.”
So what’s the answer?
According to the researchers, a pond is a small waterbody less than five hectares in area, under five metres in depth, and with less than 30% of its surface covered by “emergent vegetation”, meaning plants growing out of the water.
(This still sounds like a pretty big waterbody to us, but Cosmos is based in South Australia, where most lakes aren’t permanent.)
The researchers arrived at this classification by examining the size, depth and vegetation cover of 519 things referred to as “ponds” in the scientific literature. They compared this information to several dozen scientific and governmental “pond” definitions.
“We found that there wasn’t one definition that researchers all cited, and the definitions were often qualitative, describing a pond as ‘small,’ for example,” says Holgerson.
“At the beginning of the study, we weren’t sure if our research would allow us to propose a new definition that we felt confident about, but we think the numbers we offer are solid and a great jumping off point for further research.”
The researchers are particularly keen for more work on the borders between wetlands, ponds and lakes. Other names used for similar waterbodies, according to the researchers’ paper, include “reservoirs, oxbows, prairie potholes, vernal pools, lagoons, dams, puddles, and shallow lakes”.
Their definition did show, however, that there were key ecological characteristics that made ponds stand out.
“We looked at parameters like gross primary production, respiration, chlorophyll levels, greenhouse gas emissions, diel temperature ranges, and the rate of gas exchange with the atmosphere,” says Holgerson.
“Nine out of the 10 ecosystem parameters related nonlinearly to surface area, suggesting that ponds really are acting differently.”
While quaint, the new definition is far from trivial. Ponds emit high amounts of methane and other greenhouse gases, but their lack of distinction makes this hard to monitor.
“We may need to develop unique water quality standards for pond monitoring,” points out Holgerson.
“Researching and monitoring ponds can help us figure out how these globally abundant waterbodies function.
“There’s also an essential human element. So many people have connections to ponds—they have childhood stories of catching frogs or learning to fish in a nearby pond.”
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Lilypad Pond, Boundary Creek Trail, Yellowstone National Park
2009: 53 Charges for CNRL, Contractors in Deaths of Foreign Workers