Dear Trinidad & Tobago:
I arrived for the first visit of my life to your beautiful homeland very recently. I should start by thanking you for being so warm and friendly to this Canadian. That alone has made this visit worth it many times over. But I have an atypical reason for coming. A friend from another island nation in the Caribbean alerted me to the news that your Energy Minister Conrad Enill had announced that state owned Petrotrin had secured an 'exploration license' in the tar sands (often called “oil sands”) near Pitch Lake in the La Brea area. He further explained that they wanted to follow the “Canadian Model”. Well, as a Canadian, I know a thing or two about what that model means back home.
The “Canadian model” is a type of development for this resource-- a kind of hardened clay mixed with heavy, solid oil called bitumen and sand-- that may be feasible for the type of deposit (that is near the surface) contained on this beautiful island. It is the largest strip mines in the world, along with the massive use of fresh water supplies, heavy amounts of power (in this case natural gas) and a carbon footprint in a time of climate change that is 3 times greater than the carbon footprint of conventional oil extraction. Here is what an area with bitumen close to the surface would undergo to mine (not pump) in order to convert it into a synthetic oil.
Once a permit is granted, the first thing the industry does is “break the ground.” That means removing all trees standing on the entire deposit. This is followed by draining off all wetlands as well. Once all the tree cover is removed and the lands artificially dried up, open cast mines the entire area that the license covers begin to be dug. Anything above the bitumen is removed. Back home, the industry calls this soil “overburden”. I call it life. Then, using various means but mostly giant trucks, the bitumen-rich sands are lifted out of the earth into the carrying platform. Eventually, the tarry sands are taken and spun with water-- fresh water-- at extremely high temperatures to literally “wash” the oily hard substance off the sands. The heat for this water in Alberta, Canada is provided mostly by natural gas, and based on what Trinidadians tell me about your resource base, that would likely apply here as well.
The amount of water used in this process is approximately 3-5 barrels of water for each barrel of synthetic oil produced. That water will be reused as many times as possible, but inevitably ends up in “Tailings ponds”, holding pens for toxic waste water that includes many cancer causing heavy metals. These artificial lakes in Canada are so large as to be visible from outer space. There is no known way to treat this waste water, and currently “seepage”-- slow leaks-- of this water have gotten into the river systems nearby that now see fish with physical deformities and high levels of mercury in their bodies, moose with high levels of arsenic and much more.
Local indigenous communities that we in Canada call “First Nations” have extremely high levels of cancers, auto immune diseases and more. Doctors who have spoken out about this have been censured by various health officials for bringing attention to the sick and dying human beings.
After the mining procedure is done, the area will never be anything close to the same. Right at a time when the world wants to stop climate change, this project is why Canada was singled out at the Copenhagen talks on a global climate response as one of the main reasons the talks failed. Canada is going the wrong way on deforestation, climate change, water protection and the human rights of people trying to simply live in the area where they have for many thousands of years. So, when I heard that you have an energy minister who wants Trinidad to follow “the Canadian model”, I thought you should know exactly what that means. It is your beautiful country, your future, and I can only wish Canadians knew before it started back home. But here, it is far from too late.
More information is available at
http://ienearth.org/cits.html
http://oilsandstruth.org
