Take Charge: Dirty Work in Alberta
By Morgan Goodwin - August 26, 2008
Take Charge Campaign
This newsletter is provided by the Take Charge Campaign, a local initiative to encourage and to help people to conserve energy. It is published twice a month.
This week in Dirty Energy: Alberta Tar Sands
What's happening in the Alberta tar sands in Canada is the most destructive project on Earth, according to Environmental Defence. Thousands of square miles of tundra are being scraped away to harvest an oil-rich layer of earth between 10 and 80 feet deep.
These tar sands, or oil sands, are too dirty and difficult to extract when the price of oil is low. But as the price per barrel rises, companies are able to go to further lengths to extract energy.
There is a lot of oil (and other fossil fuels) left on Earth. According to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the global inventory is some 4.8 trillion barrels, of which about 1.08 trillion barrels have been produced, leaving 3.72 trillion conventional and unconventional barrels.
The problem is, as with tar sands, that we've already gotten all the easy and cheap stuff. The rest of it has and will continue to experience steeply increasing extraction costs, environmental costs, refining costs, exploration costs and most frighteningly, climate costs. These combine to present a very strong case for why, as a society, we need to get away from the stuff.
Unfortunately, those societal concerns have done nothing to stop the oil-rush occurring without public scrutiny in Alberta. Here's what we can expect from the exploitation of the Alberta tundra for oil:
# Oil sands mining is licensed to use twice the amount of fresh water that the entire city of Calgary uses in a year.
# At least 90 percent of the fresh water used in the oil sands ends up in ends up in tailing ponds so toxic that propane cannons are used to keep ducks from landing.
# Processing the oil sands uses enough natural gas in a day to heat 3 million homes.
# The toxic tailing ponds are considered one of the largest human-made structures in the world. The ponds span 50 square kilometers and can be seen from space.
# Producing a barrel of oil from the oil sands produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than a barrel of conventional oil.
http://www.iberkshires.com/story/28144/Take-Charge-Dirty-Work-in-Alberta...
