Canada 360 | The previous Bay du Nord

Bay du Nord is possibly the last approved fossil fuel megaproject in Canada. If it goes ahead, it will also be the first deep-sea extractive megaproject in the country’s history. Others could follow: while the ecological transition calls for replacing fossil fuels with sustainable energies, such as solar or wind power, the pressure to extract various minerals (manganese, neodymium, cobalt, tellurium) in deep waters will be more and more strong. Although we do not seem to have fully realized it, with drilling planned at 1.2 km in depth, Bay du Nord has just created a precedent.

Canada controls some 7.1 million square kilometers of ocean surface (four times the land area of ​​Quebec). For Justin Trudeau as for his probable successors at the head of the country, it seems self-evident that this fabulously vast territory constitutes a reservoir of resources to be exploited without delay. The Canadian mining industry is already actively engaged in prospecting for deep-sea minerals all over the planet. Over the next few years, in the absence of strong citizen resistance, extractive projects in Canadian deep waters will multiply.

However, from the European Parliament to Google via countless scientists, voices are rising to demand a moratorium on mining, or even on any form of extractive activity, in deep waters. The biologist Helen Scales explains the strong reasons for this with pedagogy in her latest book, The Brilliant Abyss (2021).

It invites us to approach the deep waters, located more than a kilometer below the surface, like a foreign country, both different from ours and unknown. It’s cold, always dark – sunlight doesn’t reach it – and the pressure there is such that humans cannot get there without the help of advanced technologies. Representing 95% of the habitable volume on the planet, the seabed is indeed full of life, in particular strange, bioluminescent animals, or of a surprising longevity: the watchfish can live up to 250 years, certain corals 5000 years, some sponges, more than 10,000 years old.

Although microplastics and trawling have already taken their toll there, the deep-sea nature is the wildest we have left, still remaining relatively unaffected by human activity.

Its ecosystems have been built over billions of years and have an intelligence that we are just beginning to grasp, just like the innumerable services they provide or could provide to us (particularly in pharmacology). Deep-sea research is in its infancy – for example, the ocean floor is only mapped to within 5 km, while the surface of the Moon is mapped to within 100 m.

The Impact Assessment Agency of Canada’s (IAAC) report on Bay du Nord is a concrete illustration of what it means to exploit such a deeply misunderstood environment. Will the project harm marine mammals in the project area? The AEIC confesses it shyly: “There are no direct studies of the species of marine mammals, of their frequentation of the zone for the purpose of migration, of mating or birthing, of their strategies of diet or prey preferences in the project area”. Never mind, in its uselessly abstruse scientific legal language, the AEIC ensures that the project is without danger, that it is a question of imposing on the promoter, Equinor, “mitigation measures”, the obliging for example to “stop or delay the intensification of clusters of bubblers [canons à air] for all marine mammals and sea turtles when observed in the safety zone”.

Obviously crude, the measure betrays a fact that is difficult to hide: the Canadian state ignores its territory to the point that it cannot be its fiduciary while authorizing an extractive project as heavy as that of Bay du Nord – which plans to extract between 300 million and 1 billion barrels of oil. It may well extend the list of mitigation measures ever further (the AEIC report identifies 137 of them), let’s not be fooled.

It is also not certain that said mitigation measures are respected. A Radio-Canada report recalled that, according to data from the Canada–Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, for 2017 and 2018, exploration work was not stopped once when poor weather and darkness prevented observers from visually surveying marine mammals. This monitoring will not be easier at more than a kilometer in depth…

The negligence of our leaders towards Bay du Nord is frightening; let’s hope that the popular anger it generated will be fruitful and that it feeds a broader debate on the exploitation of deep-sea resources.