[R-G] Stainsby: World's Crudest Extraction

[Anthony Fenton]

Mining
November 8, 2008
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/2124

World's Crudest Extraction
At the tar sands they’re digging up dirty fuel

by Macdonald Stainsby

The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca

As if in allegiance to the tar sands gigaproject, a convoy of trucks  
drives out of the mines near Fort McMurray. Photo: Luc Bourgeois©  
lucbourgeoisphoto.org.

EDMONTON, ALBERTA–When the Albertan government recently put forward  
$25 million to counter the negative press around tar sands mining,  
Premier Ed Stelmach strained credulity by stating: "In terms of David  
and Goliath, I've been in this position before, and now I'm here."

According to Stelmach, David was the largest industrial project on  
Earth, with nearly $200 billion in investment, being picked on by what  
he imagined were the God-like powers of environmental campaigners.

The goal of the $25 million was to make the tar sands seem like just  
another source of petroleum, including re-branding the massive  
undertaking as the “oil sands.” Of course, now that the price of oil  
has risen so high, it seems any “oil” is good “oil.” But what if it  
isn't really even oil?

Those who read the Dominion's tar sands special issue from 2007 are  
likely already aware that the bulk of today's tar sands production  
includes digging out northern Alberta's boreal forest at an  
astronomical rate in order to create what are by far the world's  
largest strip mines.

Sometimes digging to levels of over 100 metres or 300 feet deep, it  
can take anywhere between two and four tonnes of earth to produce just  
one barrel of oil. At a rate currently approximating 1.3 million  
barrels of “mock” (synthetic) crude, the rate of mining in the  
Athabasca region is far beyond that of any other process in the world.

But energy corporations, along with the Albertan, Canadian and  
American governments, are doing whatever they can to hide this basic  
information, instead simply calling the tar sands “heavy oil,” perhaps  
a little dirtier, perhaps more expensive but generally just another  
hydrocarbon.
Alberta's boreal desert: the tar sands. Photo: Luc Bourgeois©  
lucbourgeoisphoto.org.

Some of the realities of the tar sands mining process, however, are  
coming to light across North America, through not only the work of  
those opposed to the destructive process, but also because of “errors”  
being committed by the producers themselves.

On April 29, 2008, Albertans awoke to discover that “hundreds of ducks  
[were] dead or dying after landing on a Syncrude tailings pond,” the  
second largest of Syncrude’s tailings “ponds,” which, alongside  
Suncor’s, is one of the two original and still largest mining  
operations in the region. The event helped focus the media and the  
public’s attention on the ticking time bombs of waste water produced  
in the mining of the tar sands.

All mining operations in the world today, whether gold, nickel,  
cadmium or uranium produce waste, which is mixed with water in  
tailings ponds, and which will not settle or separate for centuries.

However the scale of the waste, composed of very toxic materials  
unleashed through the mining of tar sands, is practically beyond  
comprehension. So, too, are the massive piles of sulphur extracted as  
a by-product of the “slurry” upgrading process, which separates the  
bitumen (pre-fuel) from the sands.

The final product – after digging, upgrading and ultimately refining –  
is a mock crude that can become gasoline (though it produces a much  
smaller proportion per barrel than “regular sweet crude”), diesel and  
more. But the mining process is needed because the regular carbon  
breakdown and evolution of the tar sands are being artificially sped  
up by several millions of years. This is why the tar sands are so  
expensive to make into mock oil and take so much input in terms of  
energy, money, water, labour and ecological destruction to extract.

The largest trucks in the world are carrying hundreds of tonnes of  
mined land to the slurries in order to get this done. The contractors  
who carry this out are generally among those corporations who would  
help other forms of mining across North America and around the world,  
such as Caterpillar.

It is perhaps fitting that Canada, which is home to the investors and  
head offices of the mining corporations with the worst track records  
of violating human rights in the Global South, would also have the  
largest and most destructive mining operation on the face of the earth.

But there is no “poetic justice” here, rather just a local version of  
the victimization of primarily indigenous communities who live near  
theses massive mining projects that occurs around the world.

Celina Harpe, an elder from the Cree community in the northern  
Albertan village of Fort MacKay, has seen the impacts of the tar sands  
development first hand.

“They ruined our water, the air, pretty much everything else. The  
animals, the berries, all our livelihood – that’s what we used to live  
on,” she explains. “The fish; there’s no more. We can’t eat fish from  
the river, we can’t drink the water, we get sick from all that  
pollution. People are dying of cancer, whereas it never used to be  
like that. And I’m sure, I’m very positive that this has got something  
to do with the air and the water. The pollution is doing something to  
our people.”

Similar to operations across Latin America and Africa, the people who  
call the region being mined home are not given the opportunity for  
“free, prior, and informed consent” that the recent United Nations  
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples declares necessary.

Canada was one of the four countries, along with New Zealand,  
Australia and the United States, to opt out of signing this  
declaration. Hosting the offices of mining corporations both operating  
in the Global South and carrying out multiple projects at “home” is  
surely one of the major reasons why Ottawa voted against the  
ratification of that historic document.

“First Nations in the region impacted by the tar sands development in  
Alberta have been stuck in a regulatory process that has degraded  
their sovereignty by forcing them to engaged in a multi-stakeholder  
process that in no way recognizes their unique nation-to-nation  
relationship with Canada,” says Clayton Thomas-Muller, tar sands  
campaigner for the Indigenous Environmental Network.

The Albertan government is working overtime to obfuscate the actual  
environmental and human costs of producing mock oil from mining the  
tar sands. While they are spending enough money on the campaign to  
make most grassroots activists drool, it will be a test of their  
communication prowess to see if they can create the perception that  
“the oil sands will become an increasing source of interest as a  
secure, abundant energy supply. The oil sands are definitely on the  
world's radar screen,” as Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach would have us  
believe.

Invoking the war on terror and the global energy crunch, Stelmach has  
accused tar sands detractors of not only sending out misinformation,  
but “even worse, they could serve to jeopardize this country's [the  
United States’] energy security at a time when Asian markets are  
clamouring for oil." The result, he says, would be North America being  
pushed to rely upon countries such as Saudi Arabia or Iran for  
conventional oil supplies.

“In the province of Alberta, industry dominates all provincial  
regulatory and enforcement bodies and the stacks are against First  
Nations,” says Muller.

Those activists who wish to see the tar sands understood as a massive  
escalation in both the mining of the earth and the extinguishing of  
First Nations in the region already have a major asset on their side:  
the truth, along with the continued errors of tar sands producers in  
their giant strip mining operations.

Canadian mining corporations are being exposed as among the worst  
practitioners of corporate social responsibility the world over, from  
Guatemala to Australia to Chile. They must also be called out for  
using the same approach in the tar sands – not just for the multiple  
ways they impact climate change, deforestation and more, but also as  
the initiators of the largest strip mine ever conceived by human beings.

For decades, the indigenous populations living in North America have  
contended with the twins of mining and energy. In a few cases, such as  
uranium mining, energy and mining coincide in a single project. They  
do so again with a vengeance in the largest industrial project in  
human history – the tar sands, a gigaproject of strip mining the earth  
to send mock oil to the United States and leave a vast wasteland of  
poisoned land, human beings and giant lakes of waste in their wake.

With companies such as Barrick Gold going around the planet in search  
of its namesake precious metal, it is noteworthy that Canada's tar  
sands operations – using clean natural gas to produce this massive  
amount of dirty mock oil – can be seen as turning gold into lead at  
home.

Macdonald Stainsby is an avid hitchhiker and works for Oil Sands Truth.