Canada's oil sands are fueling U.S. cars - but at what cost?
McClatchy Newspapers
Published Sunday, December 16, 2007
FORT CHIPEWYAN, Alberta — Like a great silver snake, the Athabasca
River glides though a spongy-wet wilderness of spindly forests, lakes
and marshes 650 miles north of the U.S.-Canada border.
Breathe deeply, though, and you catch a whiff of fresh, hot tar. In
the river, fish are speckled with shiny, wart-like blisters. And in
the tiny Indian village of Fort Chipewyan, people are coming down
with leukemia, bile duct cancer and other diseases.
Those who aren’t physically sick are worried sick. Much of their
unease is directed upstream at a moonscape of strip mines, tailings
ponds and clouds of dust and gases, including climate-warming carbon
dioxide.
What’s being clawed from the earth there may surprise you. It’s
America’s next tank of gas.
As reserves of crude oil tighten and gas prices soar, the quest for a
backup energy source grows more heated. Already, a biofuels industry
based on corn is booming. There are dreams of adding switch grass and
wood chips to the mix, and perhaps one day running cars on cleaner
hydrogen.
In northeast Alberta, though, the race for a stand-in fuel is taking
a U-turn, one in which fleets of dinosaur-sized trucks and shovels
larger than two-car garages are tearing apart a rich mosaic of woods
and wetlands to extract some of the dirtiest fossil fuel on the
planet — more than two-thirds of which is exported to the United
States to be refined into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
All new fuels pose environmental challenges, but Alberta’s proxy
petroleum is creating many, from the destruction of migratory
waterfowl habitat to rising greenhouse gas emissions and growing
concerns about pollution and cancer.
Last month, a new report catalogued industrial contaminants — from
arsenic to mercury to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — downstream
of the digging zone and concluded that more independent scientific
inquiry is urgent.
Jim Law, the spokesman for Alberta’s minister of the environment,
disputed the report’s conclusions, saying, “The development of the
oil sands does not proceed at the expense of the environment.” But
Kevin Timoney, an Alberta ecologist and the report’s author, disagreed.
“These compounds are already at levels sufficient to cause harm,
[and] levels are increasing in concentration,” Timoney said. “There
is no logical explanation ... other than industry activity.”
The stockpile of energy under Alberta’s swampy woodlands, an
estimated 175 billion barrels of oil, is the largest reserve in the
Western Hemisphere and the second-largest on Earth, behind Saudi Arabia.
This oil doesn’t slosh into a barrel like conventional petroleum. It
clings to dark, gooey layers of sand and clay that look like cookie
dough when dug out of the ground. Alberta’s oil isn’t really oil at
all, but bitumen, used for canoe patching by early fur traders and
more recently for road sealing and paving.
Coaxing bitumen out of sand and clay and upgrading it into synthetic
petroleum is so costly and energy-intensive that for years most
companies ignored the region.
When crude oil prices climbed over $50 back in 2004, however,
companies began rushing to Alberta as if it were a new Persian Gulf.
Today, that rush is a stampede.
The road from Edmonton to Fort McMurray — the frontier outpost where
the digging starts — thunders with big-rig trucks hauling mining
gear. In town, dollars flow so freely some call the place Fort
McMoney. Near the airport, a billboard barks out the bonanza spirit:
“We have the energy,” it says.
Already, Alberta’s tar sands oil field produces 1.3 million barrels a
day, three times more than Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. By 2016, daily
output is expected to rise to 3 million barrels, exceeding the oil
production of Venezuela.
Scores of companies are active in the area, from U.S.-based Chevron
and ConocoPhillips to homegrown Petro-Canada. This year, projects,
expansions and acquisitions totaling more than $50 billion have been
announced.
From the air, the footprint of development reveals itself in a tic-
tac-toe grid of oil service roads slicing into wild country, in the
silver glint of pipelines and heavy equipment.
On the ground, a sign at one of the oldest operations, Syncrude-
Canada’s Mildred Lake mine north of Fort McMurray, assures visitors
that there is nothing modest about the place.
“Since operations began in 1978, we’ve moved over 1.4 billion tons of
overburden,” the sign reads, referring to the rock and soil over
bitumen deposits. “This is more dirt than was moved for the Great
Wall of China, the Suez Canal, the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the 10
largest dams in the world, combined!”
The disturbance is so extensive that the United Nations Environment
Program has placed Alberta’s tar sands oil field on its list of 100
hot spots of environmental change, a roster that includes the Yangtze
River Valley, drowned by China’s Three Gorges Dam.
In coming years, oil development is expected to spider-web across a
landscape more than three times as large as Lake Tahoe, making the
Alberta oil field the largest industrial zone on Earth. Wetlands
vital to migratory ducks and geese, trails worn smooth by centuries
of wood buffalo and wilderness ponds where loons lift their crazy
laughs will be lost.
“There is nothing on this planet that compares with the destruction
going on there,” said David Schindler, an ecology professor at the
University of Alberta, Edmonton. “If there were a global prize for
unsustainable development, the oil sands would be the clear winner.”
Industry officials say they are working to resolve the problems,
including reducing the climate-warming greenhouse gases emitted in
upgrading bitumen into refinery-ready crude oil.
“It’s heavy oil; it does generate more carbon dioxide in the refining
process than light oil,” said Greg Stringham, vice president of
markets for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. “But
there are significant mitigative measures that can be taken.”
One company has found a way to use cooler water in upgrading,
consuming less energy — and emitting less carbon dioxide, Stringham
said. Others are pursuing ways to capture carbon dioxide and store it
underground.
Environmentalists, though, expect such gains to be outpaced by the
rapid clip of expansion. “While they say they are bending the curve a
little bit in terms of where emissions are going, they are not
achieving a real reduction,” said Nashina Shariff, associate director
of the Toxics Watch Society of Alberta.
Among industry observers, some are skeptical.
“You put it all together and you say this isn’t a solution, this is a
problem,” said Matthew Simmons, chairman of Simmons & Company
International, an investment bank in Houston that specializes in
energy research and trading.
For local residents, the impact can be very personal.
You can hear it in the trembling of Frank Marcel’s voice as he leans
on a walker outside The Northern — the only grocery store in Fort
Chipewyan, 100 miles north of Fort McMurray — and talks about fear in
the indigenous community.
“Before the oil companies, everybody was out on the land, fishing and
trapping,” he said. “Today, we’re even scared to eat a moose.
“People used to die of old age. This generation now, everybody seems
to die of cancer.”
You can sense it in the frustration of biology professor Suzanne
Bayley with the U.S. motorists who are fueling the boom.
“What bugs us the most is Americans are not really even attempting to
conserve,” said Bayley, who teaches at the University of Alberta,
Edmonton. “Why should we destroy our environment for a thousand years
for people who are on a binge?”
With 5 percent of the world’s people, the United States burns 44
percent of the world’s gasoline, according to the U.S. Energy
Information Administration. No nation plays a bigger role in keeping
America on the road than Canada, which exports around 2.2 million
barrels of oil a day to the United States, roughly a third of it from
Alberta’s tar sands.
“Canada is like our supply closet,” said Steve Kallick, project
director of the International Boreal Conservation Campaign in
Seattle. “We keep going up there for certain things, but we never
think about what happens when we take them out.”
