[graffis-l] Canada's tar sands

[Guest guest]

>The real costs of Canada's tar sands

>Posted by: " Mark Graffis " mgraffis mgraffis

>Fri May 18, 2007 7:36 pm (PST)

>http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2006/07/07/557/

>

>Excerpts:

>

>Canada's tar sands and arctic natural gas have been on America's

>foreign-policy radar screen at least since 2001, when Dick Cheney's

> " National Energy Policy " report stated that the continued development of

>the tar sands " can be a pillar of sustained North American energy and

>economic security. " Last year, American politicians were outraged by a

>relatively small Chinese investment of $225 million in the tar sands,

>which prompted energy analyst Irving Mintzer to blurt out the widely held

>but publicly unspeakable opinion of Beltway insiders: " The problem with

>the Chinese is that they don't know that the Canadian oil is ours. And

>neither do the Canadians. " Mintzer is also a co-author of the report, U.S.

>Energy Scenarios for the 21st Century, commissioned by the Pew Center on

>Global Climate Change.

>

>[...]

>

>About half of Canada's oil production currently comes from the tar sands.

>Tar-sands oil production has been predicted to quintuple from one million

>barrels per day in 2003 to five million barrels per day in

>2030, representing over three-quarters of Canada's oil production, 70 per

>cent of which is destined for export to the United States.

>

>Around Fort McMurray over 430 square kilometres of boreal forest has been

>eradicated. There is an approved disturbance of 950 square kilometres and

>a planned disturbance of 2,000 square kilometres. Not including the loss

>and fragmentation of boreal forest from " in situ " operations in Cold Lake

>and Peace River, this will be twice the combined urban footprint of

>Calgary and Edmonton (1,000 square kilometers). No land has yet been

>certified as reclaimed.

>

>To produce one barrel of oil, four tonnes of material is mined, between

>two and five barrels of water are used to extract the bitumen, and enough

>gas to heat 1.5 homes for a day is required. Oil-sands producers move

>enough overburden and oil sands every two days to fill Toronto's Skydome

>or New York's Yankee Stadium.

>

>The tar-sands industry now consumes 0.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas

>per day, enough natural gas to heat 3.2 million Canadian homes for one

>day. By 2012, this industry will consume two billion cubic feet of natural

>gas per day, enough to heat all Canadian homes for a day. By

>2030, the tar sands are forecast to consume over five billion cubic feet

>per day of natural gas, representing more than the combined output of the

>planned Mackenzie Valley and Alaska gas pipelines, which will induce

>exploration and development of thousands of natural-gas wells and feeder

>pipelines spanning the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Alaska.

>

>The greenhouse-gas intensity of tar-sands production is almost triple that

>of conventional oil, largely due to the vast amounts of natural gas

>consumed. Even before the actual produced oil is burned, carbon emissions

>from the tar sands are forecast to increase from 23.3 million tonnes per

>year to between 83 and 175 million tonnes per year. This might represent

>almost two-thirds of Canada's 2005 " Kyoto gap " of

>270 million tonnes. Canada's " Kyoto gap " has increased from 138 million

>tonnes in 1997 to 270 million tonnes in 2005, due in large part to the

>impact of the Alberta tar sands.

>

>Approved oil-sands mining operations are already licensed to divert

>349 million cubic metres of water per year from the Athabasca River. This

>is approximately three times the volume of water required to meet the

>municipal needs of Calgary, a city of almost one million people, for one

>year. Planned projects will increase water diversions to almost 500

>million cubic metres of water per year, representing 10 per cent of the

>river's winter low flow.

>

>Syncrude and Suncor are the top two air polluters in Alberta, which have

>already degraded the once-pristine air quality in Fort McMurray, a small

>northern city of 70,000, to the level of metropolitan centres like

>Edmonton and Calgary. Air-quality modeling for approved projects predicts

>that national, provincial and international guidelines for sulfur dioxide

>and nitrogen oxide will all be exceeded.

 

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