Earth Equity News

Oil Sands Responsible for Almost Half of Canada's Increase in Greenhouse Gases. By George Tombs, CSMonitor, September 30, 2008. "The relentless search for oil has led explorers to the boreal forest [above the Athabasca oil sands] of northeastern Alberta, among the jack pines and black spruce trees an hour's drive from the boom town of Fort McMurray... [which is] is experien­cing a gold rush, even if the gold is black. The two-lane highway into town is often jammed with full-size pickup trucks and prefabricated process plants on wide-load trailers. Life in town is a frenzy of skyrocketing house prices, inadequate municipal infrastructure, mountains of freshly earned cash with little for workers to spend it on, and a huge transient population, much of it in temporary work camps. There's a severe shortage of skilled labor. Mine workers are being recruited from as far away as South Africa and Venezuela. But the biggest concern is the environmental footprint being created by oil-sands development. Extracting Atha­bas­ca's oil is costly not only in terms of infrastructure, but also in water, energy used to produce steam, and the enormous amount of greenhouse gas that results. Some question whether the scale of new projects is wise. At today's prices, tens of trillions of dollars' worth of oil are at stake. The oil sands exist in two formations: Surface deposits account for 20 percent of total recoverable reserves. The rest are at various depths underground... The ferocious rate of government approval of new projects is upsetting some Canadian politicians as well as environmental groups from the World Wildlife Fund to the Sierra Club... Who can say no to this much oil?' asks Simon Dyer, oil sands program director at the Pembina Institute, a Calgary-based sustainable-energy advocacy group... 'We have hopelessly weak greenhouse-gas [GHG] targets in Canada,' adds Mr. Dyer. 'If you look at Canada's total projected increase of GHG from 2003 to 2010, 41 to 47 percent of Canada's increase can be attributed to the oil sands. They are the one single issue dragging us away from reducing GHG emissions.'"