Oil Sands Truth: Shut Down the Tar Sands

Alberta (& Saskatchewan) Tar Sands

The process of removing the tar from the sand involves incredible amounts of energy from clean-burning natural gas (with nuclear proposed along side), tremendous capital costs during build up, incredibly high petroleum prices to protect investments, and the largest single industrial contribution to climate change in North America. Production also involves the waste of fresh water from nearby lakes, rivers and aquifers that have already created toxic tailing ponds visible from outer space. None of the land strip mined has yet to be certified as reclaimed. It takes 4 tonnes of soil to produce one barrel of oil. The tar sands are producing over 1.2 million barrels of oil a day on average. The oil companies, Canada and the United States governments are proposing to escalate production to 5 million barrels, almost all destined for American markets-- and lower environmental standards while doing so. They also would need to violate the national and human rights of many indigenous nations who are rightly concerned about many dire social, environmental and economic repercussions on their communities.

To get the needed energy supplies, diluent for the bitumen and diverted freshwater to produce and then to transport the flowing heavy bitumen for refining would require massive new infrastructure and pipeline building from three different time zones in the Arctic, across British Columbia and through Alberta in a criss-cross pattern, into pipelines to such destinations as California, China, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ontario, Illinois, Wisconsin and Texas. This entire project is now estimated at over $170 billion dollars. And after the whole process described so far, only then will all this dirty petroleum get burned and expel greenhouse gasses into the air causing further climate change.

warning: Creating default object from empty value in /var/www/drupal-6.28/modules/taxonomy/taxonomy.pages.inc on line 33.

Alberta Tar Sands is a category limited to the location and production of tar sand bitumen, an area the size of the state of Florida in northern Alberta province. The giant processing plants near Fort McMurray where the land itself is strip mined as well as the primarily "in situ" in-ground steam separation/production and extraction plants in the Peace and Cold Lake Regions, all in Alberta, are the "Ground Zero" of the single largest industrial gigaproject ever proposed in human history. The process of removing the tar from the sand involves incredible amounts of energy from clean-burning natural gas (with nuclear proposed along side), tremendous capital costs during build up, incredibly high petroleum prices to protect investments, and the largest single industrial contribution to climate change in North America. Production also involves the waste of fresh water from nearby lakes, rivers and aquifers that have already created toxic tailing ponds visible from outer space. None of the land strip mined has yet to be certified as reclaimed. It takes 4 tonnes of soil to produce one barrel of oil. The tar sands are producing over 1.2 million barrels of oil a day on average. The oil companies, Canada and the United States governments are proposing to escalate production to 5 million barrels, almost all destined for American markets-- and lower environmental standards while doing so. They also would need to violate the national and human rights of many indigenous nations who are rightly concerned about many dire social, environmental and economic repercussions on their communities. To get the needed energy supplies, diluent for the bitumen and diverted freshwater to produce and then to transport the flowing heavy bitumen for refining would require massive new infrastructure and pipeline building from three different time zones in the Arctic, across British Columbia and through Alberta in a criss-cross pattern, into pipelines to such destinations as California, China, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ontario, Illinois, Wisconsin and Texas. This entire project is now estimated at over $170 billion dollars. And after the whole process described so far, only then will all this dirty petroleum get burned and expel greenhouse gasses into the air causing further climate change.

"Shut down the tar sands," NDP candidate urges

Shut down the oilsands, NDP candidate urges
Tim Lai, Canwest News Service
Published: Thursday, September 25, 2008

VANCOUVER - Saying climate change may result in his two sons never seeing polar bears in the wild, a star NDP candidate from British Columbia called Thursday for the shutdown of Alberta's tarsands.

"We have to do something to address the climate change crisis, we need to do so now," said Michael Byers, the New Democrat hopeful in the key battleground riding of Vancouver Centre.

"We need to go after the big polluters, we need to shut the tarsands down."

Harper's plan may hit tar sands exports to Asia

Harper's plan may hit oil sands exports to Asia
Fri Sep 26, 2008 2:55pm EDT
By Jeffrey Jones

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - A campaign promise to ban exports of tar-like bitumen from Alberta's oil sands to countries that do not match Canadian efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions could affect shipments to Asia, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Friday.

Enbridge Inc, which operates the main pipeline for Canadian oil exports to the United States, is proposing a new line to Canada's west coast from Alberta to allow oil sands-derived crude to be shipped to Asia.

Oil industry studies Harper's surprise bitumen pledge

Oil industry studies Harper's surprise bitumen pledge
Dave Cooper, edmontonjournal.com
Published: Friday, September 26, 2008

EDMONTON - The Alberta government and the oil industry are studying Prime Minister Stephen Harper's surprise election pledge this morning to place restrictions on the export of raw bitumen.

Premier Ed Stelmach is expected to respond this afternoon.

Fowl play

Oilsands: Fowl play
Andrew Nikiforuk
From the September 29, 2008 issue of Canadian Business magazine

On a late July morning, 11 members of Greenpeace did what entrepreneurial activists do best: bold ventures. Armed with bolt cutters, the green crew drove north of Fort McMurray, Alta., severed a chain lock and then broke into Syncrude Canada Ltd.’s Aurora North settling basin, now known to millions around the world as the infamous watery graveyard for 500 migrating ducks. (Locals just call the waste pond “Dead Duck Lake.”)

Anti-Olympic efforts come to Edmonton

SCOTT HARRIS / scott@vueweekly.com
September 24, 2008

While it is still 18 months before athletes competing in the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games start arriving on Canada’s West Coast, last week’s closing ceremonies to wrap up the Beijing Paralympic Games signalled that the eyes of the Olympic-watching world would now fully shift focus to Canada.

Portrait of a boomtown

Portrait of a boomtown
Oil-sands projects bring big money, big headaches to remote Alberta city
By ED KEMMICK Of The Gazette Staff [Montana]

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta - On the outskirts of this town in northern Alberta, a billboard is plastered with the logos of a dozen or more trade unions. Underneath it reads: "This is what a union town looks like. Welcome to Fort McMurray."

This is also what a boom town looks like: heavy traffic everywhere, buildings going up all over town, help-wanted signs on every other marquee. Some people have taken to calling it Fort McMoney.

Montana businesses will feel economic impact from Alberta tar sands industry

Montana businesses will feel economic impact from Alberta oil-sands industry
By ED KEMMICK
Of The Gazette Staff

Financial ripples from the multibillion-dollar oil-sands industry in the Canadian province of Alberta are already being felt in Montana, but few businesses will benefit from the development as directly as Berry Y&V Fabricators in Billings.

Alberta's oil was coveted long before it was extracted

Alberta's oil was coveted long before it was extracted
Tue. September 23, 2008; Posted: 02:43 PM

Sep 21, 2008 (Billings Gazette - McClatchy-Tribune News Service via COMTEX) -- HBC | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Sep. 21--Although large-scale exploitation of northern Alberta's oil sands is a relatively recent phenomenon, people have known for nearly 300 years that the region was rich in an unconventional kind of oil.

Now Is the Time to Resist Wall Street's Shock Doctrine

Now Is the Time to Resist Wall Street's Shock Doctrine
Published on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 by the Huffington Post
by Naomi Klein

I wrote The Shock Doctrine in the hopes that it would make us all better prepared for the next big shock. Well, that shock has certainly arrived, along with gloves-off attempts to use it to push through radical pro-corporate policies (which of course will further enrich the very players who created the market crisis in the first place...).

A sea change in immigration, met by silence on the hustings

Nicholas Keung
Lesley Ciarula Taylor
Immigration Reporters // Toronto Star

When politicians talk about temporary foreign workers, which isn't often,
the Conservatives see them as the SWAT team of the global economy, the
Liberals as not conducive to nation-building, and the New Democrats as
migrants whose wages are exploitative and families fractured.

But no less than the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development has decided temporary labour migration is the global issue of