One person’s street art is another’s nuisance. Katie Dangerfield, Daniel Hallen and Yvonne Robertson look at how new limits on the amount and type of street art allowed during the 2010 Winter Olympics are making it difficult for artists.

In a city known for its high quality of life, high costs force some international students to compromise their standard of living. Grant Burns, Ursula Diaz and Michelle Ha investigate.

By Jes Abeita and Sarah Buell

Piper McKenzie is a full-time street performer whose stunts often have him balanced precariously on a ladder or juggling lighted torches in the name of entertainment. The occasional bruises and burns are just part of the job.

More Granville Island stories:

• Making art out of glass
• Escape artist’s breakout performance
• Market busker strumming to his own beat

By Daniel Hallen and Yvonne Robertson

Larissa Blockhuis uses her Saturday glass flower-making classes at New-Small & Sterling Studio Glass to introduce people to the art of glassblowing. Blockhuis studied glassblowing at the Alberta College for Art and Design. For the time she puts into giving flower-making classes, Blockhuis receives time in the studio for her own work.

More Granville Island stories:

• Knife juggling, fire eating are all in a day’s work
• Escape artist’s breakout performance
• Market busker strumming to his own beat

By Lara Howsam and Lewis Kelly

Vancouver street performer Byron Bertram reveals a few tricks of the trade, including how he escapes from a “chain tuxedo” and why he affects a British accent while performing. Bertram is one of the many entertainers who perform at Granville Island on weekends. He spoke with The Thunderbird after one such performance.

More Granville Island stories:

• Knife juggling, fire eating are all in a day’s work
• Making art out of glass
• Market busker strumming to his own beat

By Hilary Atkinson and Evan Duggan

Ron Jones is one of the many unique artists and performers sharing their talent with visitors to Vancouver’s Granville Island. For decades, Jones has shared his love of music with those around him. Now retired, Jones spends his days on Granville Island speaking to audiences through the strings of his guitar and the universal language of music.

More Granville Island stories:

• Knife juggling, fire eating are all in a day’s work
• Making art out of glass
• Escape artist’s breakout performance

Rod Gash is a resident of Kitsilano’s first homeless shelter. A recovering addict, Gash lived in area carports before the shelter opened Jan. 15 on West 4th Avenue between Pine and Fir Streets.

Residents enter the shelter through this back door.

Gash was among the sixteen people who arrived opening night. The shelter reached its 40-person capacity within days of opening, on Jan. 19.

Gash said being in Kitsilano helps him stay out of trouble and away from the Downtown Eastside, which is where many of the services for homelessness are currently provided.

“If it wasn’t for this, I would still be living in that carport over there,” said Gash pointing across the alley from the shelter.

Why Kits?

The shelter, which is scheduled to be open only during the winter months, is part of Mayor Gregor Robertson’s goal to end homelessness in Vancouver by 2015.

Celine Mauboules, housing policy planner for the City of Vancouver, said the four new shelters the city has opened in the last month were put in areas that presented the greatest need. Mauboules said Kitsilano was one of the chosen areas because it lacked any services for homelessness.

The non-profit charitable organization Motivation Power & Achievement Society (MPA) operates the shelter in Kitsilano.

“You know, you can open a shelter in another part of the city but that is not necessarily going to address the needs of the community.” Executive Director of MPA, David MacIntyre said. “Many people have been living in the parks in Kitsilano for an extended period of time, and if you went looking for homeless you’ll certainly find them.”

The shelter in Kitsilano is a HEAT shelter. It is part of the city’s Winter Response Plan. The shelter is only to be open until Apr. 30, 2010.  The Homeless Emergency Action Team (HEAT) was created by Mayor Gregor Robertson in 2008.

On any given night, up to 1,600 people in Vancouver sleep outside or in shelters, according to an official count performed in 2008 and reported by the city in a January document.

The shelter in Kits is a low-barrier shelter, meaning that carts and pets are allowed inside.

Getting the shelter up and running

Mauboles said the shelter in Kitsilano was opened hurriedly with little or no notification in the surrounding community. She said the priority was to get the shelter open as quickly as possible.

The Mantra condos are currently for sale. Some residents have already moved in.

“It was a kind of a short notification process,” Mauboles said. “But, you know, the idea of doing a lot of consultation with the neighbors, I guess there was some concern that that would take a lot of time.”

MPA operates community resource centers, and supported and licensed housing programs throughout Vancouver and the greater area, but this is their first time operating an emergency shelter.

MacIntyre, claims that the MPA is not aware of any significant issues since the opening of the shelter in Kits.

“We have been very pleased with the response from the neighbours,” MacIntyre said. “They are just pleased to see that a much needed service is being provided. We haven’t had any issues or concerns. We have been very, very pleased with how things have gone.”

Neighbourhood diversity

Directly beside the shelter is a new condominium and retail space that was completed in late 2009, The Mantra. Condos within the building run upward of $800,000.

Remax real estate agent Louise Boutin said that residents are concerned about security.

“Hire security. That is probably the best thing.” Boutin said. “I don’t know why the city doesn’t do that, I mean it is not as if it costs and arm and a leg. That’s the only issue, because it brings with it other people that might not necessarily use it (the shelter), but may be hanging around.”

Mauboles says that the city is working closely with Vancouver City Police to ensure that safety is not a concern.

“The city is well aware,” Mauboles said. “If there are some concerns related to increased crime or those kinds of issues, and it is related to the shelter, we will definitely respond quickly.”

Why now?

Both MacIntyre and Mauboles said that they do not believe that the shelter will not be open past its Apr. 30 close date.

Mauboles said that the funding, which is provided by both the municipal and provincial governments, is only guaranteed until the end of April.

Seeing people collecting bottles in the alleys of Kitsilano is not an uncommon site.

The city has not been secretive about its push to address the homeless problem, and many wonder how much this has to do with the upcoming Olympics and the many international visitors that are about to descend on the city.

Mauboles points out that the four emergency shelters, including the one in Kits, will be open long after the end of the Olympics.

“This is an ongoing concern.” Mauboles said. “And unfortunately, even though we have opened these additional shelters, there are still going to be homeless people on the streets during the Olympics. So you know, what we are trying to do is respond to critical need in the city, not just because of the Olympics.”

MacIntyre said that even though the shelter is only open for a short time he hopes that through the help of the MPA outreach workers some more long-term solutions can be provided to those who want it.

“We are the operators, so what our goal is for the shelter of course is to provide an immediate need,” MacIntyre said. “But our goals are much more far reaching than just immediate housing. Our goal is not just temporary, but actually looking at long term solutions to the homelessness situation in Kitsilano.”

The Statkraft power plant used to be a paper mill. Photo courtesy of Statkraft.com

In 1974 a researcher at the University of Connecticut submitted a paper to the journal Science. He claimed that large amounts of energy could be extracted from the natural mixing of fresh water and salty sea water that occurs at river mouths around the world.

The author, Richard Norman, was surprised when the manuscript was positively reviewed. He had submitted it partly tongue-in-cheek in response to the journal’s apparent affinity for publishing what he described as “outlandish claims”.

However, on looking closely at the numbers, he realized that this really could be a viable source of sustainable energy.

As a biologist with an interest in biophysics, he was aware of the “enormous amount of energy” involved in the mixing of salt water with fresh water, but also of a way in which this energy could be extracted via the process of osmosis.  During osmosis, water is transported through a wall while salt and other molecules are not.

Things have come a long way since then.  On Nov. 24 2009, the world’s first power plant aimed at harnessing this energy came online.

Statkraft, Norway’s national energy producer, is behind the project. After 10 years of research and $20 million USD invested, they will be looking to this experimental plant to show that this technology is commercially viable.

Free energy?

In the 10 minutes it takes you to read this story, 82 million mega joules of energy will have been dissipated by the natural mixing of fresh water and salty water at river mouths and estuaries all over the world. That’s enough energy to power more than 2,000 BC homes for a year.

To see where the energy comes from, imagine a tank with a partition down the middle: sea water on one side, salt water on the other. Remove this partition and the two liquids will spontaneously mix. At this point a physicist might tell you that there has been a dissipation of free energy as the liquids mixed.

Free energy is a lot like the proverbial free lunch in the sense that it’s not really free. Rather, it is the energy that can be extracted from the system during a reversible process.

The mixing as described above is not reversible, but if a reversible method of allowing salt water and fresh water to mix could be found, the ‘free energy’ could be extracted.

In theory, 2.2 kilo-joules of energy could be extracted for every liter of fresh water dispersed into the sea, equivalent to what you would get from burning one gram of coal.

Extracting the energy

The first ideas on how to go about extracting this energy came soon after the publication of Norman’s paper, from a researcher who was working on desalination – the process of making fresh, potable water from sea water.

Sidney Loeb was developing semi-permeable membranes that could act as salt filters. By pressurizing sea water, which requires energy, water would pass through the membrane, leaving the salt behind. They realized that this process should run equally well in reverse, with fresh water passing through the membrane producing pressurized salt water, which produces energy. This is the process at the heart of the new Statkraft power plant.

To get a better idea of just how this power plant will work, imagine again that same tank of water, now split into two by a semipermeable membrane.

Fresh water from the river fills one side, while sea water fills the other. Fresh river water passes through the membrane on its own, thanks to osmosis, which is driven by the difference in salinity.

The fresh water dilutes the salt water, but it also increases the pressure in the salt water chamber. The pressurized water can then be released through a turbine, producing energy in the same way as a hydropower station.

The pressure buildup is the manifestation of the free energy in the system. By introducing a semipermeable membrane, this energy can be extracted from the mixing process.

The technology at the center of osmotic power is the membrane. The speed with which it can pass water through will determine how much energy is produced, and whether the process is commercially viable.

Membrane technology

Karen Gerstandt is one of the researchers who worked in collaboration with Statkraft to develop new membranes. She explains that the membranes used for desalination that had been in development since the 70s were poorly suited to the application of power generation.

New membrane technology needed to be developed from scratch, and it was not until the late 90s that this research began in earnest.

The membranes produced and tested in the lab by Gerstandt and the group at the Institute for Polymer Research in Hamburg, Germany, are right on the borderline of what is required to run a commercially viable power plant. The the energy produced by the membranes depends on how quickly they allow water to pass through, and is measured in terms of the power produced by a square meter of membrane.

Stein Erik Skilhagen, head of osmotic power at Statkraft said that five watts per square meter is the magic power density that is needed. This has been proven possible in lab trials, and one of the objectives of the Statkraft plant is to see if it’s also possible in a full commercial power station.

Both Statkraft and the scientists working on the membranes admit that the large scale, real world efficiency of the membranes could well be less than what was observed in the lab. This does not worry Skilhagen, however.

He believes better membranes are not far off, saying “it’s just a matter of finding the right material. I just hope we can do it faster than has been the case with other renewables.”

Researchers too are optimistic about improvements in membrane technology.

Gerstandt is currently looking to nature for inspiration.

“Osmosis is a natural process, and there are membranes in nature 50,000 times better than what we can make in the lab,” said Gerstandt. She points to the kidneys and cell walls as examples where hugely efficient membranes play an important role.

This optimism suggests that even if the Statkraft plant fails to meet the five watt per square meter efficiency in this first installation, the problem could be easily resolved with the next generation of membrane technology.

Potential of osmotic power

The energy produced by mixing of salt and fresh water is huge. It is the ability of power producers to harness it that leaves some uncertainty as to how significant this resource really is.

According to Statkraft, in Norway alone they could generate 12 terra-watt hours annually, equivalent to 10% of national power consumption. Europe could harness 200 tWhs, while globally there is potential to produce 1200 tWhs, enough to satisfy the entire energy consumption of China.

Government and industry will need to get involved, Skilhagen says, for this renewable energy source to really take off.

“Although there has been a lot of interest from other power generators, the interest needs to be visible. Governments need to send clear signals to power producers that they support sustainable energy,” said Skilhagen.

Up to 35 positions are scheduled to be eliminated from the City of Vancouver Department of Engineering, but so far, one group appears to be safe.

Vancouver City Council passed its 2010 operating budget Dec. 18, 2009, which included cuts to programs and jobs proposed in November.  According to a union official, jobs will go as early as 1 January 2010.

The employees of the Four Pillars Supported Employment Project, who work for six-month terms over the summer, are currently being protected from the cuts.

It takes people who experience high-barriers to being employed, people recovering from drug addictions, and helps them get jobs within the Department of Engineering.

‘Walking dead’

The project is small: it’s employed 18 people in total over three years.

Anderle surveys a wheelchair ramp he helped build during summer of 2009

Mark Anderle, 41, is one of those people.

“It gave me a chance to, in a sense, recommit myself to life,” said Anderle.

Anderle has battled addiction for the last 10 years.  For the past seven years, he lived on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in a run-down skid-row hotel.

He kept what little clothing he had in a garbage bag.  He would clear a one-foot path on his bed to sleep between three- and four-foot tall piles of trash.

“I was essentially committing suicide without the guts to end it quickly,” he said.

“I was dead in any way that mattered: emotionally, spiritually, financially, physically, I was the walking dead.”

The project helped him stay drug and alcohol free, following a detox period. Through manual labour, keeping to a fulltime schedule and receiving job counseling from this project, he’s been sober for almost 18-months now.

The supported employment project is a segment of the Four Pillars Drug Policy Program, founded by former mayor Philip Owen with Donald MacPherson, the first coordinator of the program.

It’s a collaborative effort between the Drug Policy Program, the Department of Engineering, and EMBERS Staffing Solutions, a not-for-profit temporary staffing agency in the Downtown Eastside.

Related: Other supported employment projects in Vancouver

“We bring them into the workforce by giving them a leg up.” said Zarina Mulla, current coordinator of the one-person-run Drug Policy Program.

Trimming jobs

Now, the city has a budget deficit of $28 million dollars. It’s looking to cut costs.

Engineering will be hit hard. Of the more than 150 positions the city will slash, up to 35 will be from within that department.

For now, the Four Pillars program appears to be safe.

“It’s never been part of the discussion,” said Murray Wightman, in charge of Street Operations, when speaking of where the department will look to trim jobs.

The people employed through the employment project are not unionized.  Instead, they are employed through EMBERS, who then contract them to work in positions for Vancouver.

“We oppose any type of contracting out of public services,” said Mike Jackson, President of the union chapter responsible for the engineering department, CUPE Local 1004.

“But recognizing that these are individuals that get a second chance on life, we’re compassionate, we understand that, so we work through this to allow it to happen.”

Union rules

Although Jackson said he supported the project and the idea of giving people “a second crack at a new life,” he is still beholden to union rules.

In the event the city does lay-off city employees from the engineering department, those employees go on a recall list, said Jackson.

The union guarantees all laid-off unionized employees are re-employed before any new people are hired – including people from the Four Pillars program.  Jackson said this is due to the collective bargaining agreement between Vancouver and the union.

Through the project, people have worked for Sewer Operations, Water Operations, and like Anderle, forming, detailing, and finishing concrete for the Street Operations department.

Working with a small crew, Anderle helped create sloped wheelchair ramps for sidewalks, including gunnels for water-run off and non-slip surfaces, and numerous other projects making life easier for Vancouverites.

Much of the work the project employees do happens during the summer months. Jackson said many full-time engineering employees take extended vacations during the summer.  This leaves gaps with lots of work to be done and limited time before winter – gaps that people employed through the project can fill.

Wightman explained the project was not considered for cutting because its benefits outweighed its costs.

Award-winning program

On Nov. 2, the City of Vancouver was named one of the top 100 employers in Canada for 2010.  Vancouver’s provision of six-month work experience terms to individuals recovering from drug addiction is one of the five main reasons for this distinction.

The Four Pillars Supported Employment Project is the vehicle that provides these work terms.  The project is cited as an example of positive community involvement.

Donald MacPherson, former coordinator of the Drug Policy Program, including the employment project, received the Richard J. Dennis Drugpeace Award for achievement in drug policy on Nov. 13.

Anderle now lives with a roommate he met while addicted. “At that point there was nothing in our lives but drugs and alcohol,” said Anderle, talking about his experiences before he entered detox.

“He’ll be clean two years in February; I’ll be clean two years in July.  We have a beautiful home in Burnaby, we both work full-time; we both have the most amazing women possible in our lives.”

A Suncor bitumen processing plant complete with tailings ponds. (Courtesy of David Dodge and the Pembina Institute. www.oilsandswatch.org)

Northern Alberta is home to some of the fastest-growing bodies of water in the world. Every day roughly two billion litres of water – enough to fill 800 Olympic swimming pools – are added to these lakes, which are already over 11.5 trillion litres in volume.

The largest one, located near Mildred Lake just north of Fort MacMurray, is big enough to meet the water needs of a town of 70,000 people for 50 years.

But none of the artificial lakes are fit for human consumption – they’re filled with water that’s been diverted from the Athabasca River and used to extract bitumen, a viscous, tar-like form of petroleum found in the Athabasca oil sands.

As a result, the water is toxic to humans, fish, birds, and even bacteria. Covering an area of more than 130 square kilometres, these tailings ponds are far from scenic – but they’re the easiest, most efficient way to deal with the toxified water.

“In bitumen processing water is a big, big problem,” said Greg Dechaine, a researcher at the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation at the University of Alberta. Scientists are trying to find better ways to clean up the water and avoid using so much in the first place.

Heavy, viscous fluid

Their advances so far have been modest — water will probably remain a key environmental issue for the oil sands for the foreseeable future, along with the greenhouse gases produced by the energy-intensive extraction process. But their work holds promise for a cleaner future for an industrial project the size of England.

Alberta’s oil sands are made of bitumen — a heavy, viscous fluid that is eventually refined into fossil fuels, mixed up with sand, clay, and water in the ground.

About 20 per cent of the bitumen in the oil sands is close enough to the surface that companies such as Syncrude and Suncor get at it using giant shovels and dump trucks in open pit mines. The remainder is so far underground that it has to be pumped to the surface using steam and suction.

Once the sand is out of the ground, companies use a bitumen extraction process developed by Karl Clark at the University of Alberta in the first half of the 20th century.

Actually, calling it a process might give the wrong impression – essentially, the sand is simply blasted with hot, pressurized water. Dechaine described it as “like taking a plate and running it under the tap and you just basically blast all the bits and pieces off.”

The amount of water required to do this varies based on the origin of the sand. If it comes from an open pit, it takes between two and 4.5 barrels of water to obtain one barrel of bitumen. But if the sand is extracted from deep underground, about one barrel of water total is required.

Once separated from the sand, water, and clay, the bitumen goes on to be processed into usable fossil fuels. The water is recycled until it is saturated with so much hydrocarbons and metals from the sand that it cannot be used anymore. After that, it goes into one of the ever-growing tailings ponds.

A dirty problem

The tailings ponds’ water use “is the equivalent of the use of a city the size of Calgary,” said David Schindler, a professor of ecology at the University of Alberta and a leading water scientist. “Right now, it’s just sitting there indefinitely.”

Schindler sees the oil sands as a threat to the long-term health of the Athabasca River. Taking water from the river when it freezes over in the winter lowers oxygen levels in the water, making it more difficult for fish to respire.

He also said that the tailings ponds may leak into the river and cause health problems for communities downstream, though no reliable statistics are available. He has called for a moratorium on the development of new oil sands extraction plants until more research is done into reducing their environmental impact.

Terra Simieritsch, an oil sands policy analyst at the Pembina Institute, a non-partisan think-tank in Alberta, agrees. Simieritsch said she would like to see a halt on new project approvals “so we allow some time to figure things out a little bit better and have better environmental management in place.”

While the mining continues, some scientists have dedicated their efforts to cleaning up the contaminated waters.

Richard Johnson, a biologist at the University of Essex, has discovered a way of using microbes to breakdown some of the toxic hydrocarbons found in the end-process water — specifically napthenic acids. Johnson treated a naphthenic acid solution with a cocktail of naturally-occurring bacteria, and found that the bacteria will totally metabolize some of the acids into water and carbon dioxide. However, the more complex, branched acid molecules did not breakdown completely.

Strangely, the acids Johnson’s bacteria ate are toxic to the microbes themselves.

“We’ve found in many of our experiments that the acids are toxic to the bacteria as well,” said Johnson. “So, if we add too much of the acid, the bacteria will just all die, and then not eat any of them. So you need to kind of strike the right balance.”

Finding that balance might be a bit of a problem. The microbes exhibited symptoms of toxicity at acid concentrations as low as five milligrams per litre, and naphthenic acid concentrations in tailings ponds can be up to 24 times that. Still, Johnson remains optimistic that microbes will be used to cleanup tailings ponds eventually, though he concedes it might be decades away.

Another approach to making the oil sands more water-friendly is to develop an extraction process that doesn’t require water. Researchers all over the world are exploring different ways of doing this.

Going dry

In a paper published in 2008 in the journal Ultrasonics Sonochemistry, four chemists at the Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry in Moscow describe using ultrasound on oil sand to extract bitumen from oil sand.

By subjecting a sample of oil sand to sonic waves above 20,000 hertz – a sort of industrial version of the scanners used to determine the sex of a foetus – the Russians were able to shake the bitumen apart from the sand, clay and water in less than an hour.

However, the experiments were on samples of sand less than a half litre in volume, and extracted about 2.5 grams of bitumen from each sampled tested. According to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the oil sands produce over 1.3 million barrels of bitumen every day, and production is expected to nearly triple by 2025. No tests at that kind of scale have been done.

Non-aqueous extraction methods are also being explored at the University of Alberta. One is the the brainchild of environmental engineer Selma Guigard. Guigard’s method involves “supercritical” carbon dioxide – a heated, pressurized solvent that behaves somewhat like a liquid and somewhat like a gas.

Guigard’s method mixes supercritical carbon dioxide with oil sand and then de-pressurizes the slurry, forcing the bitumen to separate from the rest of the mixture. The carbon dioxide can be recycled indefinitely, and the only water involved in the process is that already naturally mixed with the bitumen, sand and clay.

Once again, though, the technique has yet to be tested at the sort of scale that would let it replace the Clark process in northern Alberta. Guigard has had difficulty obtaining the funding necessary to build a small pilot plant.

Murray Gray, the director of the University of Alberta’s Centre for Oil Sands Innovation, predicts that Guigard’s method won’t be used in industry any time soon because carbon dioxide simply doesn’t mix well enough with bitumen to be viable.

“Nothing that’s been published shows that you can get good dissolution of the bitumen in carbon dioxide,” he said. “Unless someone can lick the solubility problem, it won’t be used.”

Gray’s Centre is doing its own research into non-aqueous extraction using organic solvents like paint thinner. Currently, the Centre is trying to understand the fundamentals of how that might work.

“What we didn’t do was run into the lab with a bunch of pots and pans and start playing around with different solvents and additives,” said Gray. Instead, the Centre is focused on the basic research required to design a practical non-aqueous extraction process. Gray estimates that their method is six years away from being used by industry.

In the meantime, the tailings ponds continue to present a serious hazard to wildlife in northern Alberta. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers encourages mine operators to use “cannons, scarecrows, decoy predators and radar/laser deterrent systems,” but they don’t always work.

In April 2008 about 500 migrating ducks died when they landed on a Syncrude tailings pond, and according to the Pembina Institute about 100 wading birds mistake the ponds for mudflats every year and become covered in oil as a result.

As the tailings ponds continue to grow, environmentalists like Simieritsch and Schindler are pessimistic about the future of the Athabasca River. Schindler said he saw no new methods on the horizon that could operate at the needed scale.

“If they can go ahead with these non-aqueous bitumen extractions and they’re found to be safe, then that’s great,” said Simieritsch. “But, you know, we still see that current [mining] projects are going ahead with large volumes of water use.”