The Most Destructive Project on Earth: Alberta’s Tar Sands » Celsias
With oil prices over $100 a barrel this week, the companies involved in Canada’s tar sands must be rubbing their hands in glee. The $26 a barrel cost of processing (compared to about $1 in Saudi Arabia) suddenly doesn’t look so bad. Oil companies who have chosen not to invest may be tempted to reconsider, and that’s very bad news.
The Athabasca tar sands, in Alberta, may be the world’s largest oil reserve. Only the surface sands are accessible at the moment, but if the technology develops a little more, there’s potentially six times more oil there than the whole of Saudi Arabia – enough to last 200 years, say the champions of the project.
But, it’s not liquid oil, and extracting the crude from the sand takes vast reserves of water, a quarter of Alberta’s fresh water. This water is so polluted at the end of the process that it is simply left to stand in huge tailing pools that altogether cover some 50 square kilometres. It’s so toxic that birds landing on the ponds would die. Some places use propane cannons to scare the ducks away; others just rake the dead birds off the surface. As the ponds aren’t lined, waste water leaks into the Athabasca River, polluting everything downstream – lakes, deltas, and the Mackenzie River.
It also destroys the land. Huge areas of the boreal forest ecosystem have been felled and the underlying peat bogs cleared away to expose the sands. At the end of the processing there is nothing but a ‘toxic moonscape’ of earthworks, ponds, and 80 foot high piles of pure sulphur. 5,000 hectares have been destroyed already, and David Schindler of the University of Alberta estimates that in ten years time they will have cleared an area the size of Florida.
The air is not spared either. It takes enormous amounts of heat to extract the oil, approximately a barrel of gas for every two of crude. The total emissions of the tar sands project will soon be equivalent to the whole of Denmark. Acid rain falls all across Alberta and now Saskatchewan too. In the summer, the tailing ponds release carcinogenic benzene. “If the wind is from the north-west,” writes Aida Edemariam of the nearby boomtown of Fort McMurray, “you can smell oil on the air: heavy, slightly sour, unmistakable.”
All of this makes the tar sands ‘the most destructive project on earth‘ (pdf), according to last week’s report by Environmental Defence.
Having read last week that the site was visible from space, I tracked it down on Google. It’s right here if you want to explore it and see for yourself.
The Most Destructive Project on Earth: Alberta’s Tar Sands » Celsias
Friends, how then can we join to fight oil drilling and oil pipelines companies. Pipelines through central states like South Dakota are being planned as we speak to to take oil out of Canada through areas like South Dakota. How can we galvanize good planning in the poorer states like South Dakota where near Elk Point a company named Hyperion wants to build the largest oil refinery in the country and says it will be green. The governor says he wants the Hyperion oil refinery to attract young people! It seems to me oil refining won’t attract young people and can’t be “green” if extracting the oil leads to the destruction you describe. But what can we do while they go full speed ahead trying to build the refinery in Elk Point, South Dakota to refine and get oil to markets. It seems we have to offer those states better alternative truly green deals and industries that help their damaged economies to make clean energy business more interesting and capable of paying for their children’s educations and health care. Soon! We have to do this human part, because otherwise, desperate people seem to go for the old solutions and short term measures. I’m told that wind power in some of those states could supply the whole state and export. That’s under way in South Dakota, but still there is this interest in oil! Surely there are alternatives, but people are going for oil because they are poor and afraid. I was so impressed by Ghandi when he went to England and spoke cheering words to the manufacturers of cloth–because although his country had been exploited, he felt, by the English system he was ousting, he still had concern for the people in England who would be losing jobs so India could take over the cloth industry. We have areas that need more than consoling where leaders didn’t think long term about car designs, secure lending practices, etc; or until now had few solutions for those who needed jobs and income. So it seems if we want a clean environment, we have to offer solutions for the people who need solutions that don’t harm us all. Clearly it did not solve anything for the American car companies to put off energy efficient designs and longer-lived cars so that Honda and Toyota sold the long-lived economy cars. It just brought workers and stockholders into shared economic wastelands, didn’t it? So how can we make clean energy pay before more desperate states like South Dakota approve oil lines and oil refineries in the few areas with clean air to bring this oil to the market. We need alternatives for the people or they go desperate. In those areas, we have folks who are used to hard work. We do seem to have a lack of a dream of economic sustainability in those areas. I am tired of only sad laments when what I know is needed is economic plans for clean energy that takes care of health care and education needs. It’s not selfishness. It’s dire need. So where is the plan; where is the money. Don’t stop telling us the truth, but tell more important things like what to do and NOT do in South Dakota that will sustain the effort and attract the future minds of young people away from oil. Sincerely, Mary