Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Environmental impacts of oil spills are a major concern for the Canadian public. Regulators and the scientific community are also uncertain which methods are best to employ when cleaning up oil spills in different environments. Improving effectiveness of clean-up procedures under realistic field situations is required to address these significant knowledge gaps. The collaborative research being proposed here will be conducted by researchers from the Universities of Manitoba, Calgary, McGill, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique and the International Institute for Sustainable Development-Experimental Lakes Area (IISD-ELA). It will consist of a large multi-phased project to examine the fate and behaviour of spilled oil, and to compare spill clean-up methods in a freshwater environment. The project includes participation from industry, government, First Nations and community groups, and will quantify impacts (i.e., ecological, social and economic value from lost ecosystem services) of oil spilled into freshwater environments. Examining effectiveness, and impacts, of current oil spill clean-up methods in freshwater systems is a key component of the project. Many current strategies for removing spilled oil focus on mechanical removal; however, this can be ecologically damaging and economically costly. The goal of the proposed project is to determine relative effectiveness of physical, chemical and biological oil spill clean-up methods in different shoreline environments. Small-scale model oil spills will be used to examine the ability of different cleanup methods to remove residual oil and maintain ecosystem function in enclosed regions of a natural boreal lake. The work to be conducted in Year 1 will serve as a pilot experiment which aims to determine the oil product to be tested in the full-scale field study in Year 2. Ecological recovery of the affected areas, together with social and economic impacts of incorporating different remediation approaches for responding to spills will be quantified through monitoring the contained environments in Year 3 and 4. Optimizing remediation strategies applied to oil spills will benefit Canadians by significantly improving response efficiencies and restoring ecosystem services more quickly.