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Experts criticize upgrader proposal
| Edmonton Journal | Hanneke Brooymans | June 09, 2010
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Fort Saskatchewan residents have twice as many hospital admissions and emergency room visits as people in surrounding counties, an Energy Resources Conservation Board hearing was told Tuesday.
It’s not clear what role pollution from the surrounding industry plays in these statistics, but it’s something local public health authorities should look into, said Stuart Batterman, a professor of environmental health sciences from the University of Michigan.
Batterman was speaking to the three-member panel of the ERCB that is in the second week of a hearing into a proposed bitumen upgrader that the Total oil company wants to build in Strathcona County. The upgrader would eventually convert 295,000 barrels of bitumen from the oilsands into synthetic crude oil each day.
Batterman, whose resume includes more than 300 publications on aspects of air pollution, said the hospital-admission statistic applied to most age groups in the city. He criticized the current ERCB process, which doesn’t require companies such as Total to look at the current health conditions of people living near the proposed project, despite the fact some of those conditions would make individuals highly vulnerable to pollutants. He also told the panel what was currently being emitted in the area has been underestimated. Pollutants released during plant upsets and flaring are not included in those amounts, he noted.
Several area residents are challenging the company in the hearing, but overall attendance is sparse. About a dozen residents watched the proceedings Tuesday.
During a break, Batterman said involvement in the hearing process by residents is essential but wasn’t surprising more weren’t there.
“This is a complicated issue,” he said. “It’s something off in the future. It doesn’t seem to be affecting them now. They already have a lot of industry. They’ve become somewhat used to it. It doesn’t seem they see anything different in their lives.”
Batterman told the panel that Alberta guidelines for sulphur dioxide emissions would be exceeded more often if the province followed the lead of the United States.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week cut the sulphur-dioxide emissions limit to 75 parts per billion for a one-hour average. “The reason for this is health-driven,” Batterman said.
That limit is less than half of Alberta’s current limit, set at 172 parts per billion. The Fort Air Partnership said the provincial guideline was exceeded eight times in 2009 in the area it monitors, which includes the industrial heartland.
Batterman said the number of times the guideline is exceeded would go up tremendously if the American standard is adopted, which is something the province often does. The area in which the guideline is exceeded would also grow, he added.
Another issue raised at the hearing was light pollution.
Central Alberta has one of the highest levels of light pollution in Canada, save for Montreal and maybe Toronto, because of street lights and a high density of petrochemical plants, said a light pollution expert. James Benya, principal of a lighting design consulting practice in the United States, said light pollution is a health hazard. Nerve endings in eyes trigger the internal body clock, which regulates biological processes, and being exposed to excess light at night can upset those rhythms. At petrochemical plants, that lighting can come from lights on towers to flares, to general lighting of the grounds.
Total has plans to reduce light pollution, which Benya thought were commendable, but he added that the results would depend on the details of how those ideas were implemented. Comparable projects in the area have failed to address the issue, he said. Projects in Texas, for example, have demonstrated that you can have well-lit projects, even while using light-pollution reducing measures, such as shielding.
Karen McDonald, director of environmental health at Concordia University College, like Batterman and Benya, also gave evidence on behalf of area residents.
The atmospheric chemist criticized some of the modeling that was done to predict how local area quality would be measured. She was especially perplexed that some air emissions, such as ozone, are still not required in environmental impact assessments in Alberta, even though they are nationally recognized as having health effects. “Other jurisdictions have passed us by,” she said. “We used to be leaders.”
Tagged with: public health, total, energy resource conservation board, air pollutants, public hearing, fort saskatchewan
