The tar sands are the largest energy and industrial project right now on the face of the planet. And they’re much unlike conventional oil operations. To get a single barrel of oil from the tar sands, it does require three to five times as much energy as a conventional barrel of oil. In addition to that, it requires about three to five barrels of fresh water to get a single barrel of oil out of the tar sands. And when you consider that over 1.3 million barrels of oil are produced every single day, it’s quite a dramatic impact.
In addition, tar sands are very unlike conventional oil operations. What you’re getting out of the ground is not a liquid substance, but a very viscous heavy substance, much like tar, called bitumen. To get that out of the ground, of course, you know, requires vast amounts of energy, but the extraction process is fundamentally different, as well. So you’re not looking at traditional pump and jack wells, like conventional oil operations, but you’re looking at either a process of creating vast strip mines, much like coal strip mining, where you basically scrape away the boreal forest, all the—everything above the earth’s surface, and then you’re slowly carving out these mines that are, in some cases, over a hundred meters deep.
In other cases, you’re building deep in situ technology where you’re creating these vast well pads, using natural gas or coal to superheat steam, which is then pumped underneath the ground to superheat the earth to basically melt the substance so that you can take it out. So, as you can imagine, that process is very destructive. The area available for tar sands leasing is about 149,000 square kilometers, which in American terms is about the size of the state of Florida. So, you’re looking at vast impacts on fish, on animal species and, of course, First Nations in the area, and then all of us, when you look at some of the climate and water impacts of the tar sands development.
One is by creating these vast open pit strip mines, which are really very much like coal strip mines. And so, you’re looking at scraping away everything above the topsoil. Industry likes to refer to it as overburden. We like to call it boreal forest or ecosystems. All of that is scraped away. There’s also a vast amount of wetlands in the area, so all of those are drained. And then you start carving into the earth. And so, you’re building these mines that in some cases are over a hundred meters deep, kilometers and kilometers or miles and miles wide. And they’re very vast. They use the largest steam shovels in the world, the largest dump trucks in the world to excavate the dirt as fast as possible so that they can get to the bitumen deposits. So that’s one type of extraction method.
The other type, that is—you know, looks and industry refers to it as more environmentally sensitive, but the impacts are actually more severe than the mining operations, are what is called deep in situ, or SAG-D operations, steam-assisted gravity drilling. And basically, what happens in these operations is you build a network of gigantic well pads. And so, in order to get to the well pads, of course, you need roads and infrastructure, and so the impact on the surrounding area is just as vast as the mining operations. Once you build these well pads, what you’re using is natural gas or coal to superheat steam. You’ll pump that underneath the ground, which of course, you know, will superheat the earth to try and melt this very viscous substance so that they can actually suck it out. Of course, you know, the deep in situ actually uses more energy and uses more water than the mining operations and so is very impactful from a water perspective, from a human rights perspective, and then definitely from a climate perspective. It definitely pushes us in the wrong direction at a time where we need to be reducing our emissions, not increasing them.
And with the tar sands, they’re the largest cause of greenhouse gas emission growth in Canada. By 2020, they will potentially emit over 141 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the air every single year. To put that in perspective, that’s almost double what all the cars and light trucks in all of Canada produce. So it’s more than entire countries, is what’s coming out of the tar sands in Alberta.
a group of 50 prominent Canadians sent Obama a letter yesterday, saying it would be wrong to have faith in untried methods. They said, quote, “Costly and unproven technological fixes, such as carbon capture and storage, do not provide silver bullet solutions to addressing emissions from tar sands.”
in the tar sands, you have every major international oil company being involved in the extraction. And so ,you have oil companies from around the world, from Exxon, Imperial, Shell, Total, Statoil, Hydro, British Petroleum. Everybody is wanting to get a piece of the tar sands, because it is a money-making opportunity for them, but of course it comes with an ever-growing environmental and human rights price tag.
And when you talk about carbon capture and sequestration, definitely we don’t see it as a—we see it more as a smokescreen than a silver bullet. What you have is the federal government and the provincial government here in Canada, convened a task force to look into the possibilities of carbon capture when it comes to the tar sands, and what the task force’s own findings were was that it had very little implications when it comes to tar sands because of how many different point sources of emissions that you have within the tar sands and because of the variability within that. So, when you have the government’s own advisers saying that there’s a very limited role, it’s hard to put any faith in carbon capture at all.
Canada, of course, is the largest supplier of oil to the United States, and the majority of that is coming from the tar sands. So, there definitely is a huge dependency issue.
– from democracynow