Is oil from tar sands a climate crime, as activists claim? It’s an argument at the heart of debate between energy security and environmental security, says Jon Entine

If there is any doubt that the December Copenhagen climate change talks will disappoint environmentalists, one has to look no further than to the pitched battle over the vast oil reserves buried in the sands of the remote boreal forests of northern Alberta, Canada.

Throughout the autumn, Greenpeace activists and other environmental groups, citing research on tar oil from the Canadian-based Pembina Institute and other NGOs, blockaded oil production at various tar sands facilities in Alberta owned by many of the world’s largest oil companies. They shut down operations and unfurled a huge banner, seen on TV around the world, proclaiming “Tar Sands: Climate Crime”.

And they may be right. But that doesn’t mean reasonable people should want them to win the battle to scuttle one of the most massive, if dirty, oil projects of modern times.

Conservation, a dramatic shift to wind and solar energy, and a ramping up of carbon-free nuclear energy – the supposed silver bullets of greenhouse gas reductions – will not put a serious dent in the growth of world energy consumption. In the coming decades the developing world will demand the kind of energy-intensive lifestyles the west takes for granted. That’s the challenge for the buyers and sellers of energy and the world energy chessboard that they command. Fast-growing and energy-hungry India, China, and Russia are sucking up oil from known reserves, particularly in the Arabian peninsula and Africa, and are drawing on their own vast coal supplies. That means industrial giants, such as the US and the EU, are forced to depend even more on newer finds coming online.

Geopolitically, for the US and Canada, that may not be such a bad thing. Not too many years ago, the US had to depend for its oil on a host of geopolitically unreliable countries, Saudi Arabia being the largest. Thanks in large measure to the discovery of massive oil reserves in the tar fields of Canada’s northern provinces, the US’s neighbour is now the biggest supplier. Currently, 16% of American oil imports originate in Alberta, and with two major pipelines in production, those figures should swell significantly. But at what environmental cost?

What’s at stake?

Oil sands have only recently been considered part of the world’s oil reserves. Many countries in the world have large deposits of oil sands, including the US, Russia and various countries in the Middle East. However, the world’s largest deposits are in Canada and Venezuela, both of which have reserves roughly equal to the world’s total known reserves of conventional crude oil.

The Canadian tar sands are buried below the remote Boreal Forest of northern Alberta, spread out over 138,000 square kilometres (an area the size of Florida). At 173bn barrels, Canada’s reserves are the largest concentrated source of crude oil outside the Middle East. They were long considered too expensive to exploit, but higher oil prices and new technology have enabled them to be profitably extracted and upgraded to usable products. Because growth of oil sands production has exceeded declines in conventional crude oil production, Canada has become the largest supplier of oil and refined products to the US, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Mexico.

Dirty energy

Extracting oil from tar sands is a messy business. It’s the crudest form of oil production, as it takes about four tonnes of tar sands to produce one barrel of oil. Heavy machinery is used to suck the heavy, dirty oil slurry known as bitumen from deep below the surface. The production process generates lots of greenhouse gases, though how much is a point of contention. The National Resources Defense Council has issued a report claiming that producing a barrel of oil from the oil sands generates three times the emissions of extracting a barrel of conventional oil. Global Forest Watch Canada, a campaigning NGO, has issued a blistering report claiming that the disturbance of trees, shrubs and peat, where biological carbon is stored, could release almost nine megatonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

“Tar sands crude oil is dirty from start to finish,” says Ann Alexander, senior attorney at the NRDC. “It’s bad enough that [these oil companies are] fouling our natural resources here in the [US] Midwest [to where much of the tar sands oil will be piped], but it’s completely destroying them up in Canada. There are good sources of energy we can we can turn to that don’t involve turning entire forests into a moonscape.”

But two studies released last summer by the US-based consulting companies Jacobs Consultancy and TIAX LLC, which were funded by the Alberta Energy Research Institute (AERI), concur with previous studies by the US government that greenhouse gas emissions are almost comparable. And in an effort to blunt some of the criticism over greenhouse gas emissions, Alberta premier Ed Stelmach has pledged to spend $2bn to fund research on technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions generated by the oil sands industry.

There is little controversy, however, over the fact that the extraction process is environmentally destructive. The first step involves clearing vast amounts of wilderness for open-pit mining – meaning that plants, trees and topsoil must be extracted by the truckload. Nearly 80% of the oil lies so deep underground that it needs to be either injected with steam or put through a “fireflood” process. Because five barrels of water are typically needed to produce a single barrel of crude, surrounding rivers must be routed to the pits, with the black water then rerouted to manmade lakes of toxic sludge.

Growth v environment

So why are these projects going forward? Geopolitics is at play. Secure energy resources are critical in a hostile world. Oil sands production is expected to almost double in Canada by 2015. Of the 1.25m barrels extracted daily from the sands, 1m goes directly to the US. By 2020, that number could be as high as 5m, according to the NRDC. And there is the huge financial windfall likely for BP, Shell, Exxon and many smaller firms. With those factors on the table, campaigns by environmentalists to scuttle the projects are both hapless and hopeless.

Is there room for dialogue? At this stage, the protestors seem less committed to discussions than confrontation. Shell Canada has expressed willingness to meet the activists as the project proceeds. “We want to engage other NGOs and environmental NGOs,” said Shell Canada spokesman Paul Hege. “Our offer to discuss their concerns about oil sands developments and their vision for the energy future still stands.” Greenpeace has not yet responded.

Scientists are also dedicated to developing ways to soften the environmental impact of the extraction method, including a focus on nanotechnology, which can reduce the industry’s thirst for water and remove many impurities that enter the environment.

Looking ahead, the potential environmental impacts will be weighed against the energy security and economic benefits offered by these huge reserves. It has been estimated that the oil sands could provide upwards of $500bn for the North American economy and generate about 5.4m person-years of work between now and 2020 – an enormous and positive economic jolt.

With so much at stake, neither the US nor Canada is likely to agree to curtail what both countries see as a critical partnership, no matter what pressure might come out of Denmark. The estimated boost of $123bn to Canada’s economy by 2020 generated solely from tar sand oil production has convinced Prime Minister Harper to protect the oil sand industry, which will make his decision to contribute to greenhouse gas rollbacks more difficult. The legislatures in both Canada and the US appear disinclined to embrace the unrealistic – indeed disingenuous – 2050 cutback targets for energy consumption now being floated in the weeks before the climate change summit.

With the political situation among Opec countries fragile, western countries are looking for secure ways to address their energy needs. In that context, the Canadian reserves are strategically critical, and at least at this stage, environmental concerns will take a back seat. And that’s not a bad thing.

Jon Entine is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC and founder of ESG MediaMetrics, a sustainability consultancy.

*In an earlier version of this article it was incorrectly suggested that the Pembina Institute blockaded oil production at Alberta facilities. This was not the case.



Related Reads

comments powered by Disqus