Erstellt am: 25. 5. 2010 - 14:39 Uhr

The Tar Sands of Canada

As the Gulf of Mexico is strangled by oil, billions of dollars are being pumped into an even dirtier and more carbon-intensive form of exploitation.

According to its own figures (quoted today in Kurier) BP has already invested 760 million dollars in attempts to plug the oil leak that is strangling the Gulf of Mexico, and has promised a further 500 million dollars for the assessment of the ecological damage of the spill. Is this a threat to their solvency? Nothing of the kind: in 2009 the company had a turnover of $239 billion dollars and profits of $16.6 billion. There's plenty still to invest - but in what? The long promised shift to low carbon technology?

No.

The head of BP Tony Hayward may have described the environmental catastrophe as a "transforming event" that would result in significant changes to the oil industry, but his company looks set to flourish in the future due to massive new investment in what environmentalists have described as the dirtiest form of oil exploitation there is – the harvesting of bitumen from the Canadian tar sands.

friends of the earth

Bitumen is oil in a solid or semi-solid state. It’s found, saturated in water, in the vast deposits of sand and clay that cover an area of the Canadian province of Alberta that is the size of England and Wales. This area consists largely of high latitude boreal forests that have traditionally provided one of the Earth’s most effective carbon sinks. BP is by no means alone in investing in tar sands exploitation. The environmental group Friends of the Earth estimates that by 2025 oil companies will have invested $379 billion dollars in business which has been called “the largest industrial project in human history”.

“an insane investment”

Environmentalist Alex Steffen, who is giving a talk at the Vienna Town Hall tonight as part of the ERDgespräche, has called it “an insane investment” that “combines both the downsides of drilling for oil and mining for coal and is unbelievably toxic.” He points out that strip-mining not only destroys vast tracts of the Canadian forest and wetlands, turning parts of them into denuded lunar landscapes, but is itself highly costly in terms of energy and water resources. It is thought to produce three times the greenhouse gases than average conventional oil production and three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. Basically the bitumen has to be boiled to displace it from the sand. For this aim, natural gas has been piped down from Alaska and water has been diverted from the Athabasca River.

This, of course, makes it more expensive to extract than conventional oil reserves, but in an age of increasing energy insecurity that is a price that many are increasingly prepared to pay. As BP itself has put it this is an “untapped resource from a politically stable country” and that it the sort of scenario that warms the hearts of shareholders. The Canadian tar sands are already the biggest source of US oil imports. Pipelines are being planned to Asia, where refiners have expressed interest in receiving Albertan bitumen to off-set their reliance on the Middle East. The National Post reported recently that Alberta's oil sands industry is planning to boost production from 1.3 million barrels a day to 3.5 million barrels over the next decade.

WWF

photo: Jiri Rezac /WWF-UK

That, say the environmentalists, spells bad news for the indigenous residents of settlements near the tar sands local communities. Friends of the Earth claims the industry produces 1.8 million litres of unrecyclable wastewater a day. This contains poisons such as arsenic and mercury that have to be stored in large earthen dams that are so large that they are visible from space. There are constant fears about leaks and local communities have reported finding high levels of chemicals in their water supply that they say have leaked from waste-water storage ponds downstream. They also claim that the fish and game that they rely upon for their food supply have also been contaminated.

This, in turn, has led to health concerns. The Independent reports that one local resident from Canada said he had seen 30% more levels of cancer in his community, many of them rare types.

The tar sands industry has done much to undermine the squeaky clean image that Canada likes to present to the world. The boom in the industry was a key factor in its decision to abandon its Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gases commitments in the late 1990’s. And the tourist board's glossy pictures of the crystal clear glacial lakes are increasingly juxtaposed in the public consciousness with the post-Apocalypse nightmare of the open-pit mines.

Talking the Talk?

But the major importer, the USA has a role to play here too. President Barack Obama likes to talk the talk. In the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster he has won wide public praise for his condemnation of the "cosy relationship" between oil companies and regulators. His election promise to break America's addiction to "dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive oil" was thought to explicitly refer to tar sands exploitation. But will he walk the walk? We have seen little concrete success in weaning America off carbon-intensive fossil fuels. On the contrary, just before the Gulf of Mexico disaster, Obama proposed to open vast expanses of water along the US coastline for drilling in an attempt to appease domestic drilling advocates. So how should we judge his current rhetoric?

As Alex Seffen told me: “I think it’s somewhat difficult to explain American domestic politics to people who are sane.”

Tar Sands produce in Europe?

The environmental pressure group Greenpeace, meanwhile, claim that tar sands oil is increasingly being consumed here in Europe. They have traced it down the pipes of Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas, from where it is apparently shipped to European ports via tankers. Greenpeace warns that imports of tar sands oil could increase dramatically unless the European Parliament adopts tough anti-pollution measures and fuel quality legislation.

“We can stop this before it gets out of control,” says Greepeace's John Sauven.