(Adds Imperial Oil comment)
By Nia Williams
March 15 (Reuters) - The Canadian and Alberta
governments will establish a federal-provincial working group to
accelerate remediation of oil sands tailings ponds, the Alberta
government said on Wednesday, as investigations continue into an
ongoing tailings leak at Imperial Oil's Kearl project.
Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault and Alberta
Environment Minister Sonya Savage met on Tuesday to discuss the
incident at the 240,000 barrel-per-day Kearl mining project in
northern Alberta.
Industrial wastewater containing toxins including arsenic
and dissolved iron has been seeping from tailings ponds at Kearl
since at least May last year. Last month, Imperial reported a
separate leak of more than 5,000 cubic metres (1.3 million
gallons) of tailings water from one of its holding ponds.
"The ministers also discussed accelerating collaboration on
a long-term solution for the treatment and remediation of
tailings ponds and will work to establish a federal-provincial
working group to ensure this is developed as quickly as
possible," a readout of the meeting released on Wednesday said.
Alberta's oil sands mines produce vast quantities of toxic
tailings water. Total volumes reached 1.36 trillion cubic metres
in 2020, according to the Alberta Energy Regulator.
Calgary-based Imperial, majority-owned by Exxon Mobil Corp , and the AER have both been criticised for failing to
properly disclose the Kearl tailings leak to local communities. Alberta has sent officials to Kearl to conduct independent
water sampling, in addition to monitoring by the AER and
Imperial, according to the meeting readout. Guilbeault and
Savage agreed to share testing results and review information
exchange processes.
Last week, federal inspectors said the leak is harmful to
wildlife and ordered Imperial to take immediate action to
contain the seepage.
Imperial said on Wednesday nearly 200 people are working on
related activities at the site and have made progress on
mitigating seepage, almost completing the clean-up of the
drainage pond overflow.
The company said that monitoring and water sampling data
shows no impacts to local waterways or drinking water, and that
the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo has declared drinking
water to be safe in the nearby community of Fort Chipewyan.
(Reporting by Nia Williams in British Columbia; Editing by
Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Marguerita Choy)
Messaging: nia.williams.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net))
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