4 April 2006The Star PhoenixMargaret Munro
Alberta may be swimming in oil, but a new study says the province is in grave danger of running out of water.
There is an "impending water crisis" on the western Prairies with "far-reaching" implications, says the study released Monday by the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It says Alberta, with its booming and thirsty economy, is most vulnerable.
Lead author David Schindler, a celebrated environmental scientist at the University of Alberta, says the province needs to put the brakes on the energy boom and population explosion until it figures out how to better manage and conserve its dwindling and critically important supply of water.
"We really need to pull out all the stops on water and watershed conservation," he said in an interview.
Schindler, who has long warned about looming water shortages, says even he was "shocked" by some of the findings of the study, which charts how Prairie temperatures have been rising over the last century and water levels have been dropping.
"Worst affected is the South Saskatchewan River, where summer flows have been reduced by 84 per cent since the early 20th century," reports Schindler and co-author William Donahue of Freshwater Research Ltd. in Edmonton. Municipalities, industry and agriculture draw heavily from the river, which is fed by shrinking glaciers in the Rockies and flows through Alberta and into Saskatchewan.
While the drop in the South Saskatchewan is the most dramatic, records for other major rivers follow the same direction. Rivers such as the Peace and Oldman, which have been radically altered by dams, reservoirs and large-scale water extractions, have summer flows 40 to 60 per cent below historic values, the study says.
Summer flows in the lower reaches of the Athabasca River, which supplies water to the massive oilsands projects in northeastern Alberta, have dropped 30 per cent since 1970. The study says extracting oil from the tarsands consume three to six barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced. If water use is not curtailed, Schindler and Donahue predict by 2020 the massive project could be consuming nearly half the low winter flow in the river, which is critical to fish and the ecosystem of the Athabasca Delta World Heritage Site.
Schindler says there has been enough waste water generated by the oilsands project to fill Lake Erie. "And it would be full of toxic water," says Schindler, who would like to see the multibillion-dollar project scaled back until engineers figure out how to recycle and reuse water.
"The thing I object to is that they are just plowing ahead with the technology that they have now because they can make such big profits."
The study says climate change has compounded the water woes and forecasts it will make things much worse in the future as the glaciers, which act like water towers for the Prairies, continue to recede and temperatures climb.
Schindler and Donahue examined temperature, precipitation, evaporation and river flow records from 11 sites, from Forth Smith in northern Alberta south to Regina.
