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The U.S. is getting an increasingly large share of its oil from Canada's tar sands. Buying oil from a friendly neighbor is great for national security, but still comes with environmental consequences. NPR's Elizabeth Shogren reports on a new study that shows tar sands oil production in Alberta, Canada, is polluting area lakes.
ELIZABETH SHOGREN, BYLINE: The forested part of Western Canada where tar sands oil is produced is so rich and thick with the asphalt-like stuff that you can actually see it coming out of the ground all over the place. That's made it easy for the industry to claim that contaminants in the waterways got there naturally. To investigate that, researchers had to find a way to go back in time. John Smol is a biology professor at Queen's University in Ontario.
JOHN SMOL: Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days of the year, mud is accumulating at the bottom of a lake. It's like a history book. The deeper you go, the older it is.
SHOGREN: Smol and scientists from Canada's federal government environmental agency analyzed mud from the bottom of several lakes. They saw that the level of contaminants increased after the 1960s and 1970s when tar sands development started and then rose sharply in recent years when tar sands production spiked. The scientists also demonstrated that the source was not natural.
SMOL: So the types of contaminants could also sort of point the finger, if you like, at, yep, it's coming from the tar sands operation.
SHOGREN: The contaminants the researchers found are from air pollutants coming off the production and processing of the tar sands oil. These toxic chemicals are linked to cancer and other serious health problems, but the levels found in the lakes are not high enough to pose environmental or health problems.
SMOL: I'm not saying that these lakes are toxic pools. The contaminants in these lakes are now about the same level that you might see in a lake, you know, in an urban - like a city setting.
SHOGREN: Smol says he worries that as the industry ramps up production, the contamination will get worse. The research was published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It notes that this pollution wasn't picked up by the industry funded monitoring program that was supposed to track environmental risks from tar sands over recent decades. University of Alberta Professor David Schindler is one of Canada's most esteemed ecologists. He was the first to tie the industry's air pollution to contamination of waterways a few years ago.
His research prompted the federal and regional governments to reconsider whether they should have been letting industry monitor the environmental effects of its own operations. Schindler says the old monitoring program sent his blood pressure up for decades.
DAVID SCHINDLER: It's a very disgusting history, I would say, that we now know that we've spent 30 years and millions of dollars on a monitoring program that has yielded very little of use.
SHOGREN: Schindler says because this evidence was absent, the industry didn't have to come up with cleaner ways to do its work.
SCHINDLER: The attitude has been, oh, this is a remote area. Nobody is going to care. I think that's going to change.
SHOGREN: But industry spokesman Travis Davies says the pollution levels shown by the new study aren't high enough to suggest that the industry needs to change.
TRAVIS DAVIES: You go back to the fact that you needed to find whether this has an impact, a negative impact on the environment, and this study shows it doesn't.
SHOGREN: And he says more studies are needed to pinpoint what aspect of the industry is responsible for the levels of pollution that were found.
DAVIES: Because until you know that, you don't know where to apply the technology, you don't know where to change your process, you don't know what regulations to change. So there's not a lot of point in running out and spending billions of dollars unless you know that it's going to work.
SHOGREN: The Canadian government has pledged to create a new monitoring program that is independent from industry and the government to try to get more answers. Elizabeth Shogren, NPR News.
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