Mission Impossible? Oil sands advocates disagree on how to improve the reputation of the oil sands

In the face of vociferous criticism, oil sands stakeholders and lobbyists discuss how best to remediate the industry’s reputation

By Bill Sass

September 15, 2008

“Are we on ‘mission impossible’?” bitumen belt pioneer James Hyne wondered in an address to professional peers in Calgary.

“We’re fighting the image of ‘dirty oil’,” he said in urging scientists and engineers to take seriously the worsening status of Alberta’s fossil fuel crown jewel in fashionable opinion.

The oil sands have popped up as a target for global disparagement akin to the Newfoundland seal hunt three decades ago, Hyne adds. “The dirty oil campaign reminds me of those pictures of Brigitte Bardot out on the ice with the seals. And she destroyed the Canadian sealing industry.”

“The public responds to what things look like,” says the 79-year-old, who has spent a lifetime trying to spread reason.

The chemistry professor’s career includes founding Alberta Sulphur Research Ltd. and a stint as a team leader with the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (now the Alberta Energy Research Institute).

“It’s the image. That was the significance of the ducks,” he says in explaining why accidental deaths of a statistically tiny number of common birds in a waste tailings pond riveted hostile global attention on the oil sands last spring. “It was the picture in people’s minds. The migrating ducks flew 5,000 miles, almost got home, got covered in oil, and didn’t make it.”

Unless reasonable explanations are compelling, no amount of putting events into technically correct perspective can counter popular symbols steeped in emotion, he warns.

“The language we use is critical. The public must understand. We talk a language that might as well be Greek as far as they’re concerned,” Hyne says, urging oil sands scientists to learn how to communicate with people outside their peer group.

At the same time, lawyer Elizabeth May, founding executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and leader of the national Green Party, reminded the industry of the hard environmental line it is up against. She laid out her case in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, a reminder of the wide audience critics of the oil sands receive.

“The oil sands are the most dirty, wasteful way of obtaining energy on the planet,” May wrote. “At a time when global warming is an increasing problem, why should this industry be expanded willy-nilly to make the problem worse?”

The Alberta government has earmarked $25 million for an information campaign. There is much talk of “rebranding” the province. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has started a website to counter the attacks.

Can public relations campaigns and polite digital conversation restore the good name of the oil sands and the province?

Ken Chapman, president of Cambridge Strategies Inc. in Edmonton, says it is futile for oil sands companies to fight in the public relations arena. “That battle is already lost. The 500 ducks that died on a tailings pond resonated around the planet.”

Chapman predicts any industry public relations drive or “messaging” will be swept away by bloggers calling it “greenwash,” and the $25-million provincial government information campaign will backfire on them for basically the same reason.

The answer to repairing the tarnished environmental reputation of Alberta and the oil sands lies in real action, he says. “They’ll have to show what they’re doing to reduce greenhouse gas, and reclaim land.”

They’ll also have to show they’ve developed a consciousness about the effects their projects are having on the climate, the economy and the social structure of the province.

Companies “are making hay while the sun shines,” and pushing ahead with projects that strain the province’s social and environmental fabric, Chapman says. Polling has repeatedly shown that even Albertans, many of whom depend on the energy industry for their livelihoods, are becoming uncomfortable with oil sands development and its environmental effects.

A Cambridge Strategies survey of 3,400 Albertans during the recent royalty debate showed deep concern over habitat protection, greenhouse gases, water use and reclamation, he says. “The royalties themselves weren’t that big a deal,” Chapman reports.

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