[R-G] The true costs of the tar sands project

[Anthony Fenton]

ENVIRONMENT
The true costs of the tar sands project
ALANNA MITCHELL
January 17, 2009
TAR SANDS Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
By Andrew Nikiforuk
GreyStone Books, 214 pages, $20

***

Canada has no cohesive energy policy. Nor does it have a cohesive  
environmental policy. Put the two together, and you get the tar sands  
of Alberta, in all their hideous glory.

Andrew Nikiforuk's Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent  
lays bare the idiocy of this malignant neglect. The book is, in  
essence, a revolting, blush-making case for Canada to develop  
integrated energy and environmental regulation suitable for the post- 
carbon age. And then swiftly enforce it.

The Alberta tar sands - which boosters like to reposition as the  
Alberta oil sands because that makes them sound a little cleaner - are  
Canada's dirty little secret. They are the world's largest energy  
project, largest construction project and largest capital project, so  
large that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has likened them to the  
building of the Egyptian Pyramids or the Great Wall of China.

But their impact on the planet is on a scale that far outpaces those  
other human-built wonders of the world. And what does it leave? The  
monument to a thriving culture? No. Open-pit mines. Tailing ponds full  
of weeping toxic sludge. Masses of local pollution. And enough  
climate- and ocean-destroying carbon dioxide to make it a world-class  
catastrophe.

As Nikiforuk shows all too clearly, the massive and growing project  
gulps fresh water, destroys valuable boreal forest, poisons air, water  
and soil and uses up a substantial portion of the energy it produces.  
To wit (using figures Nikiforuk says are conservative): To make one  
barrel of bitumen, the muck that can eventually be processed into  
synthetic crude oil, takes an average of three barrels of fresh water  
and two tons of sand.

That same barrel produces at least 1.3 barrels of fine-tailings toxic  
waste and an ounce of acid-rain-producing sulphur dioxide. Then it  
uses up 1,400 cubic feet of natural gas in the upgrading, or a third  
of the amount of energy the barrel will eventually produce. By the  
time the sludge is a barrel of processed synthetic crude, it has  
produced 187 pounds of carbon dioxide, three times as much greenhouse  
gas as a traditional barrel of oil. And that's before it's burned.

It's a bad deal for the local environment. It's a rotten deal for  
taxpayers and citizens. The ratcheting up of the atmosphere's carbon  
dioxide concentrations - both in the natural gas used to extract the  
tarry sludge and in the destruction of carbon-storing forests and bogs  
- makes it unconscionable in the larger arena of planetary health. The  
tar sands are Canada's largest (and growing) source of carbon dioxide.

That they exist at all is a scandal. That they are growing so quickly  
is nothing short of a cynical and dangerous gamble. Nikiforuk shows,  
for example, in the sickening chapter on money, that the government  
subsidies to the tar sands mess - largely in the area of a dirt-cheap  
royalties structure - would go a long way toward financing clean and  
renewable energy, so badly needed in this era of dangerous climate and  
ocean change.

The $200-billion in international money that has gone so far in  
building up the infrastructure in the tar sands could have gone for a  
cleaner solution. The volumes of relatively clean-burning natural gas  
used to extract the filthy synthetic crude could be used as fuel to  
heat homes. There's even talk now of using nuclear energy - which at  
least has the merit of not producing much carbon dioxide - to power  
the tar sands. It's utter folly.

But why would human civilization choose to use clean energy to produce  
dirty? It's a canonical example of externalizing the true costs of  
investment, of failing to insert the price of producing something into  
its retail cost. It is a failure of capitalism, a financial dodge-and- 
weave gambit that leaves civilization as a whole holding the bag.

So where does the blame lie? I began to wonder, as I immersed myself  
in the Alice-in-Wonderland world Nikiforuk describes, whether the tar  
sands could have happened anywhere but in Alberta. That province was  
already in thrall to the oil and gas companies and had a low level of  
public discourse when the tar sands really began to explode.

When I lived there for six years, until 2000, as a national  
correspondent for The Globe and Mail, I was continually struck by the  
opaque nature of its politics and of decision-making, of the steel  
walls and bitter retributions set up to discourage questioning from  
media or citizens.

And could the tar sands have happened without a willing federal  
government, of whatever stripe? Not a chance. The federal government  
is proud of the project.

Think of it this way: If the tar sands project were happening in  
China, with all the toxic waste, greenhouse gas pollution,  
environmental destruction and social havoc that is happening in  
Canada, we in the West would use it as stick to beat the Chinese  
government with. It would stand as the metaphor of a rapacious  
government gone badly wrong.

In the end, it may fall to U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, who is  
visiting Canada soon after his inauguration so he can have a chat  
about, guess what, energy and environment, to point out the obvious:  
Canada could be a clean-energy powerhouse for the modern world, if  
only it would get its policy house in order. The tar sands - in their  
present form - are unlikely to be part of the recipe.

Alanna Mitchell is the author of two books on the global environment.  
The second, Sea Sick, will be published in Canada in March.