Saw-Whet Owl Photo:Edgar T. Jones
Dollars & Sense: The True Costs of Alberta's Oil Sands
By Chris Genovali
The biggest oil development scheme in the history of North America is about to commence. Oil company consortiums and corporate investors plan to invest more than $25 billion over the next twenty years into mining the northern Alberta oil sands.
The oil sands occupy an area the size of New Brunswick in Alberta's boreal forest. They contain an estimated 300 billion barrels of oil, approximately one third of the world's oil resources. Industry predicts that by the year 2020 they will be producing up to 1.2 million barrels a day.
Not surprisingly, additional pipeline capacity to the USA is in the works. The planned route for this "express pipeline" is through threatened native prairie grasslands, which support more than 100 endangered species.
Alberta environmentalists are calling upon the federal government to include oil and gas export projects in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. Between 1984 and 1993 almost 600,000 kilometres of seismic line was shot in Alberta. In total over 225,000 wells have been drilled; 1.5 million kilometres of seismic road access have been cut; 750,000 kilometres of all weather road access built; and 500,000 kilometres of pipeline right-of-way cut, all without federal or provincial Environment Impact Assessments. Meeting the projected export demand to the year 2000 will require thousands more wells.
More soil has been excavated by Syncrude than from the construction of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Great Wall of China, the Suez Canal, and the 10 biggest dams in the world combined.
Dore Lake Photo:Jerry Markewich
Oil sands reserves at or near the surface are strip-mined. Huge mounds of oil sand are excavated and moved by 3-story-high trucks, weighing 240 tons apiece, to extractors where the material is heated until the sand separates from the oil. It takes two tons of sand to produce one barrel of oil.
Since 1978 Syncrude has excavated 1.5 billion tons of 'over-burden', the 20-meter thick layer of muskeg, gravel and shale that sits atop the oil sands.
Calipso Orchid Photo:Jum Butler
The deeper oil sands reserves are recovered by drilling horizontal wells and injecting massive amounts of steam into the ground. This method requires nine barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil. A Shell Canada oil sands plant has already dried up one lake and lowered the level of another so that it froze solid, killing all the fish. Shell is currently taking enormous amounts of water from the Peace River for its oil sands production.
There is serious concern about the long-term effect of the steam injection process on boreal hydrology. Drying from oil sands developments combined with global warming and increased fire patterns could transform the boreal into a huge bomb.
Oil sands development produces four times more upstream greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil reserves. The oil sands are already Alberta's biggest single emitter of sulfur dioxide. Alberta emits 500,000 tons of sulfur dioxide annually. Petroleum operations in Alberta and nearby parts of BC are the second largest source of sulfur emissions in North America, next to the industrial regions of eastern Canada and the USA.
Clearcut, Dore/Smoothstone Photo:Bruce Slusar
While forestry and oil and gas activity skyrocket, Alberta's Ministry of Environmental Protection is being bashed. Over the next three years, the department will lose 500 jobs and $164 million. In addition, the province's new 'Regulatory Reform' initiative means that the oil industry will essentially be handed the responsibility for monitoring its own water and air emissions.
The new oil sands developments overlap much of the 10,000 square kilometer unceded traditional territory of the Lubicon Cree. The Lubicon are already struggling to preserve their boreal homeland from forestry and conventional oil and gas. With the huge additional profits to be made from oil sands developments, the future of the Lubicon looks bleaker still.
The oil sands developers are promised major tax breaks, and they will pay a miniscule one percent royalty on oil sands production. Alberta's government continues to subsidize a destructive, polluting industry at the expense of energy efficiency and alternatives to fossil fuels. The oil sands may provide a short-term boom, but at what cost?
Chris Genovali is Director, Canadian Forest Protection Project, Pacific Environment and Resources Centre
