Tough Oil: Digging Up Nature's Last Defense

UPDATE:The Independent reports that British Petroleum (BP), which advertises itself as a green energy company, has reversed a long standing policy to invest in extracting oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. The company previously had not invested in the play because of the high cost of extraction, but in light of near $100/barrel oil its new CEO has reversed course and signed a joint venture with Husky Energy. The joint venture will invest $5.5 billion in the Sunrise field to construct a facility capable of producing 200,000 barrels of crude per day. The oil sands boom now includes all the major multinational energy companies. As my original post below says, extracting oil from bitumen is a process that is hugely energy intensive and wrecks the boreal forest turning it into a moonscape of pits and ravaged earth. The boreal forest is one of Earth's last major carbon sinks. BP says it will use in situ steam extraction which it claims is less damaging to the forest, but the process requires the heating by natural gas of huge amounts of fresh water (350 cubic meters/year from the Athabasca River). The water becomes so contaminated it cannot be returned to the environment but must be stored in vast holding ponds as large as 20 square miles. Environmentalists say the tar oil boom is the biggest environmental crime in history because the extraction process produces so much CO2 that Canada will miss it's mandatory emission targets under the Kyoto Treaty in 2012. Is BP really "beyond petroleum"? Not so much.

[first posted 9-29-07]
You know that trees respire from your high school biology class. That is, they soak up CO2 like a giant sponge for photosynthesis and give off oxygen. The Earth's forests are the last defense against global warming and catastrophic climate change. One of the last great expanses of untouched forest are the boreal forests that circle the Arctic. But a region in northern Alberta the size of Florida is being stripped bare of trees and the land dug up in a hellish industrial operation to create epic strip mines. Al Gore calls the whole enterprise, "truly nuts". The object of the frenetic activity is bitumen,or in American English, asphalt. A heavy viscous sludge that is a mixture of low grade crude oil, clay and sand. The natives had no use for the gunk except to patch their canoes with it. Oil is now above $70 a barrel so even this low grade stuff is worth the awesome amount of expense and energy to mine and process it into flowing oil. For each barrel of oil, workers must mine two tons of tar sand, wash it, heat it using clean natural gas, remove heavy metals, sulphur, and other impurities to produce one barrel of usable oil. The amount of energy consumed in the process is staggering. Every 24 hours the industry burns enough natural gas to heat four million American homes in order to produce one million barrels of oil. The chief economist of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce says,"You know you are at the bottom of the ninth inning when you have to schlep two tons of sand to get a barrel of oil. [italics mine]". The proven reserves are estimated to be 175 billion barrels or the biggest deposit of hydro-carbons outside of Saudi Arabia. The tar sands now supply the US with 16% of its oil imports, and that could rise to a quarter of imports if project rates of extraction are implemented. The demand for secure oil is definitely there.

Not only does the production consume much more energy than it produces, but it is creating an industrial waste land out of what was once a pristine wilderness. Gigantic holding ponds contain water contaminated with heavy metals, toxic aromatic hydrocarbons, salts and napthenic acids. One company alone dumps 250,000 tons of toxic gunk every day into the lake behind the Syncrude Tailings Dam which is now the largest dam in the world by volume. The water for the chemical processing comes from the Athabasca River, once a serene wild river filled with fish and abundant wildlife living on its banks. The Athabasca is now polluted by the leaking holding ponds. The summer flow past the boom town of McMurray, affectionately known as McMoney to it's get-rich-quick residents, has been reduced by a third. Enough fresh water is drawn out each year to service a city of two million people. On average three barrels of fresh water are needed to make one barrel of oil from the tar sands. The impact of the boom on wildlife has yet to be extensively quantified, but a good guess is that when you chew up the forest and dig huge pits with electric shovels the size of a two story building, it cannot be beneficial. One energy watchdog group, says that woodland caribou populations around current in situ thermal operations have crashed by 50% and that fur bearing animals and songbirds can be expected to decline by 80%.

If this pillage in neighboring Canada is not enough to make you go out and buy a hybrid vehicle maybe this thought will: tar sands are also located in the western United States. Utah sits atop extensive tar sands deposits. Untill now it has been un-economical to exploit these resources. The US Department of Energy says that Utah's reserves are lesser in quality than Alberta's. Also, the lack of unappropriated water in arid Utah is a problem. Vast amounts of water would be necessary to make steam for in situ thermal extraction. But as we approach the bottom of the barrel and prices for oil continue to rise on the world market, that equation is changing. Two of the prime tar sand sites are in the middle of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. So think about that the next time you fire up your 12 mpg Hummer to enjoy a road trip across the beautiful and enchanting American West. It may not be there tomorrow.

Adapted from an article by Andrew Nikiforuk, Canada's Highway to Hell.