Marita Prandoni has a passion for exploring different cultures and worldviews. She draws inspiration from her family, tutoring extraordinary youth, meeting unexpected heroes and from the stunning natural beauty of her home turf in and around Santa Fe, NM.
| Oil Sands: Abandoning Clean Energy for Canada’s Dirty Reserves? |
| Tuesday, 18 August 2009 | Marita Prandoni | Blog Entry |
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The only problem is that getting at bitumen is like separating January molasses from sand and clay. Every barrel filled means four tons of Earth moved. And the aggressive extraction and pre-processing generates five times the greenhouse gases of conventional crude. Formerly moose and bison hunting grounds for Chipewyan and Cree Indians, Alberta’s oil sands (also called tar sands) reserve along the Athabasca River first had to be cleared of its boreal forest. In the late 1960s, with no notice given to the people of the Fort McKay First Nation aboriginal community, Syncrude—Canada’s largest oil producer—moved in. Bitumen must be strip-mined—dug out with five-story-high shovels. Once extracted, it is separated from the sand using hot water and steam, sometimes with caustic soda. The bitumen is heated with burning natural gas to upgrade it to synthetic crude before it travels down pipelines to refineries in Edmonton, Ontario, and the US. The contaminated water is discharged into tailing ponds, which now cover more than 50 square miles. With oil prices surging and fears of peak oil, petroleum companies saw an opportunity to exploit Canada’s oil sands and feed its hungry neighbor. Over the past decade, it has become home to the world’s largest commercial industry in oil-sands extraction and the largest single supplier of oil products to the US. Alberta’s oil-sand reserves are second in the world only to Saudi Arabia’s, with the potential to recover more than 300 billion barrels. Again, the problem with oil-sands bitumen extraction is that it’s the world’s dirtiest oil. The Obama administration is facing a decision to allow a new 1,000-mile “Alberta Clipper” pipeline, which could carry 800,000 barrels a day from the oil-sands operation all the way to Wyoming. The Dirty Oil Sands Network—which includes environmental groups ForestEthics, Greenpeace, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Indigenous Environmental Network, Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network and others—is urging the US to consider that energy security and climate security go hand-in-hand, and to delay the decision until after the December climate summit in Copenhagen. Federal law empowers the Secretary of State to decide if pipelines can cross the border into the US. If Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approves the Alberta Clipper, it will represent a huge setback in the US’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Here is a link you can use to tell Secretary of State Clinton to reject permits for the pipeline. [Update: Sadly, Clinton approved the permits on August 20. Earthjustice, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups are planning to sue the government to stop the pipeline.- Ed.] Oil lobbyists, though, are relentless—and they’re stooping to town-hall disruption tactics to organize anti-climate-bill rallies around the country. One such group opposing legislation to halt global warming is Energy Citizens. It is funded by the American Petroleum Institute. According to their spokeswoman, Cathy Landry, “Climate-change legislation being considered in Washington will cause huge economic pain and produce little environmental gain.” Economic pain? Maybe short term, in making the transition to renewable sources of energy. Little environmental gain? Nothing could be further from the truth. Additional resources:
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If you take a flight over northeastern Alberta, Canada, and survey the landscape, you will notice a menacing 
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