Finding the right balance is tough...
http://www.thenorthernview.com/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=142&cat=48&id...
By - Brooke Ward
Sep 05 2007
Many of us here in the Northwest seem to know what we want: economic development and sustainability. And we also know what we don’t want: destruction of natural resources. Unfortunately, the Provincial Government seems convinced that we can’t have one without the other.
Three years in a row the Tahltan people have blockaded Shell’s access to the Klappan while our Minister of Energy and Mines acts as a marketing director for Shell rather than addressing the true needs and concerns of British Columbians.
Coalbed methane, or natural gas trapped in coal, is risky and furthermore, unproven. The chance of water contamination is more than I’m willing to risk, with the lifeblood of three of the rivers that flow through the northwest in the vicinity.
The interconnectedness of the region is exemplified by the communities built along those rivers and the fish stocks that depend upon them but even more than that, this issue connects us directly to our money-hungry neighbours to the East (wow, look what we have in common already).
Alberta’s tar sands cover an area larger than Florida, and are said to contain more oil than Saudi Arabia. In fact, the deposits in Alberta are estimated to contain more than 85 percent of the world’s total bitumen reserves. Not surprisingly, Shell is a leading extractor of bitumen in Alberta.
So how, exactly, does that relate to us? Well, tar sands are a mixture of sand or clay, water and extremely heavy crude oil. The only limits to the “unlimited” extraction of oil from the deposits are water and natural gas. Syncrude requires an incredible amount of energy to produce and at this point most of the energy is derived from burning natural gas.
Well darn, natural gas production in Alberta peaked in 2001 and has been static ever since so now, in order to meet growing demands, companies have to look elsewhere.
When a company like Shell has an estimated 60 billion barrels of raw bitumen waiting to be unlocked, they have several hundred billion reasons to want the natural gas to do so.
So not only is it our waters potentially being contaminated, but the people of Northern Alberta actively having their resources poisoned by the contaminated castoff waters from the syncrude production that is left in festering ponds.
Now doesn’t this all seem to be getting a little bit redundant… taking natural gas from one area and creating a potential biohazard in order to fuel an industry that is estimated to produce half of Canada’s increase in Greenhouse gas emissions by 2010?
You don’t have to be a tree-hugging environmentalist to see the damage being done.
But then, we don’t live there so we don’t really have to think about it, right?
When are we going to wake up and smell the smog?
