[R-G] Oil sands and devastation

[Anthony Fenton]

Oil sands and devastation
Will Canada's petroleum boom be an ecological bust?
By Rob Gillies
Associated Press
Published: September 28, 2008
http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,700261958,00.html

FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta — The largest dump truck in the world is parked  
under a massive mechanical shovel waiting to transport 400 tons of  
oily sand at an open pit mine in the northern reaches of Alberta.

Each Caterpillar 797B heavy hauler — three-stories high, with tires  
twice as tall as the average man — carries the equivalent of 200  
barrels of heavy oil worth about $23,000 per haul at today's prices.

"It's like sitting on your back porch and driving your house," said  
Todd Dahlman, the manager of Shell Canada's Muskeg River open-pit oil  
sands mine in Alberta's Athabasca region.

Shell, which has 35 of the massive loaders working 24 hours a day,  
seven days a week, has ordered 16 more — at $5 million each — as it  
expands its open-pit mines. And it is not alone among major oil  
companies rushing to exploit Alberta's oil sands, which make Canada  
one of the few countries that can significantly ramp up oil production  
amid the decline in conventional reserves.

Shell, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Canada's Imperial and other companies  
plan to strip an area here the size of New York state that could yield  
as much as 175 billion barrels of oil. Daily production of 1.2 million  
barrels from the oil sands is expected to nearly triple to 3.5 million  
barrels in 2020. Overall, Alberta has more oil than Venezuela, Russia  
or Iran. Only Saudi Arabia has more.

Oil companies also want to tap into Utah's oil-shale and oil-sands  
resources. The U.S. House of Representatives, responding to growing  
public demand for more domestic energy, voted Wednesday to end a  
quarter-century ban on oil and natural-gas drilling off the Pacific  
and Atlantic coasts — and a more recent ban on developing oil shale in  
Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.

The three Western states may have up to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil  
trapped in oil shale, by some estimates. Environmental groups strongly  
opposed lifting a moratorium on issuing final rules to allow leases  
for development, saying it will threaten wild areas, use huge amounts  
of scarce water and increase global warming. Many critics of  
developing Utah's oil shale and sands have pointed to the devastation  
in Canada.

High prices are fueling Alberta's oil boom. Since it's costly to  
extract oil from the sands, using the process on a widespread basis  
began to make sense only when crude prices started skyrocketing  
earlier this century.

But the enormous amount of energy and water needed in the extraction  
process has raised fears among scientists, environmentalists and  
officials in an aboriginal town 170 miles downstream from Fort  
McMurray. The critics say the growing operations by major oil  
companies will increase greenhouse-gas emissions and threaten  
Alberta's rivers and forests.

"Their projected rates of expansion are so fast that we don't have a  
hope in hell of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions," said Dr. David  
Schindler, an environmental scientist at the University of Alberta.

Oil-sands operations, including extraction and processing, are  
responsible for 4 percent of Canada's greenhouse-gas emissions, and  
that's expected to triple to 12 percent by 2020. Oil-sand mining is  
Canada's fastest growing source of greenhouse gases and is one reason  
it reneged on its Kyoto Protocol commitments. Experts say producing a  
barrel of oil from sands results in emissions three times greater than  
a conventional barrel of oil.

Worries about environmental damage have gotten enough attention that  
even the oil industry realizes it must tread softly on the issue.  
"Industry has to improve its environmental performance," Brian  
Maynard, a vice president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum  
Producers, said recently.

Dave Collyer, Shell's chairman in Canada, said world demand means oil  
companies must exploit unconventional sources of energy.

"You have to consider the environmental impact in a broader context,"  
Collyer said. "There is significant economic benefit from the  
development of oil sands. The oil sands represent a very secure,  
reliable, long-term source of supply to the United States. People in  
the U.S. will have to judge whether that supply stacks up to other  
alternatives."

The oil industry's Maynard also said companies would be able to  
develop techniques to protect the environment in the same way they  
made the process of oil-sands extraction commercially viable over the  
past 20 years. "It will take time," he added.

But David Suzuki, Canada's most prominent environmentalist, cautioned  
against accepting the argument that the oil industry would develop  
safer techniques such as carbon-capture storage, noting that the time  
and money needed to determine such methods could not be predicted.

"They say, 'No, no we're going to do research and really clean up our  
act.' Well, you can't give these guys permission to go ahead on the  
promise that something is going to happen in the future," Suzuki said.

He and other critics warn the environmental ramifications are too dire  
to ramp up oil-sands production. They argue that Canada's boreal  
forest, one of the largest intact ecosystems in the world, is being  
torn up to make way for the mines.

They also say that not enough was done to safeguard the environment  
while two smaller Canadian firms — Suncor Energy Inc. and Syncrude  
Canada Ltd. — extracted the oils sands for decades and that the  
situation is becoming alarming as major oil companies become more  
involved.

"For 40 years, a couple of oil companies worked on the tar-sands  
extraction process, not its environmental impacts. It was Alberta's  
massive expansion of tar-sands leasing over the last few years,  
ignoring serious unanswered environmental and public health concerns,  
that created this mushrooming crisis," said Gary Stewart, a senior  
adviser to the International Boreal Conservation Campaign.

Refineries in the U.S. Midwest are retooling and expanding so they can  
process the thicker oil, raising concerns about more emissions.

Many people also are worried about the amount of water taken from  
Alberta's Athabasca river. The extraction process uses 2 to 4 1/2  
barrels of water for each barrel of oil produced, according to the  
Pembina Institute, a nonprofit think tank.

There are concerns, too, about the tailing ponds that sit next to the  
river. The ponds contain waste made from the separation of oil from  
sand. The toxic ponds look more like lakes and take up 50 square miles  
of northern Alberta.

Jeff Short, a U.S. government scientist who studied the long-term  
effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, said if one of the ponds  
spilled into the river, the impact would be felt for decades — or  
centuries. "It would be the equivalent of several hundred Exxon Valdez  
oil spills," he said.

A flock of 500 migratory ducks recently died after landing on one of  
Syncrude's ponds, and an accidental discharge from a Suncor waste  
treatment plant in 1982 caused the closure of the commercial fishery  
downstream in Lake Athabasca for three years.

Residents of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta's oldest settlement about 170  
miles downstream from the projects, are worried that toxins from the  
ponds could seep into the river and drift into their drinking water.  
They say they have caught deformed fish in Lake Athabasca and the  
river that feeds it.

John O'Connor, once the doctor of the native community of 1,200, found  
five cases — an unusually high incidence — of cholangiocarcinoma, a  
rare cancer of the bile duct. The illness is so uncommon it is usually  
seen in one in 100,000 people.

The government disputed O'Connor's diagnosis, said O'Connor was  
raising undue alarm and accused him of professional misconduct in a  
formal complaint. O'Connor has since left the community, and officials  
have yet to issue final judgment on his case.

"There are major health issues at Fort Chip," O'Connor said. "I'm just  
one of a chorus of people that are concerned."

The government only recently announced it would study the cancer rate.  
Aboriginal leaders have urged a definitive study for years.

Aboriginals, environmentalists and some opposition members of the  
Canadian Parliament are urging a moratorium on new development until  
more is known about environmental and health effects of oil-sands  
mining.

"It's unfathomable what's going on here," said George Poitras, a  
former chief of the Mikisew Cree First Nation in Fort Chipewyan.  
"There are gross negligent environment and health issues being  
observed."