SURFACE WATER POLLUTION FROM OIL AND GASES IN ALBERTA (Essay Sample)

SURFACE WATER POLLUTION FROM OIL AND GASES IN ALBERTA
Introduction
One famous poet by the name W. H. Auden once denoted that ‘Thousands can live without love but none can survive without water’. While everyone understands the importance of water to every living thing, we take it for granted anyway. It has been proved that 80 percent of the global water waste is dumped untreated to the rivers, lakes, and oceans, thus polluting the aquatic environment. The main pollutants of these water bodies are oil and gases from industrial activities (1). Water pollution is a global challenge and it is putting people’s health at jeopardy because unsafe drinking water kills more people yearly that war and all other kinds of violence together. The available clean and safe water sources are very limited and that is only 1 percent of the earth’s fresh water. This calls for an action to avert this challenge because by the year 2050 the demand for fresh water will have increased by one-third of the current demand (2)
In this paper we shall focus on the surface water contamination mainly from oil and gases in the Alberta and Columbia. We shall focus mainly on acidification on the water bodies as the main effect from the oil pollution in Alberta.