The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [168]
424 The most promising current underground extraction technology is steam-assisted gravity drainage, in which pressurized steam is forced underground in long horizontal injection wells to heat the bitumen. After about six months of heating the bitumen begins to flow and can be pumped from a second, parallel recovery well to the surface.
425 From Alberta Energy, the total area leased for in situ (underground) development as of May 19, 2009, is 79,298 square kilometers. J. Grant, S. Dyer, D. Woynillowicz, “Clearing the Air on Oil Sands Myths” (Drayton Valley, Alberta: The Pembina Institute, June 2009), 32 pp., www.pembina.org. Future projections from B. Söderbergh et al., “A Crash Programme Scenario for the Canadian Oil Sands Industry,” Energy Policy 35, no. 3 (2007): 1931-1947. As of 2009, oil production from Alaska’s North Slope averaged about seven hundred thousand barrels per day.
426 Government of Canada, Policy Research Initiative, “The Emergence of Cross-Border Regions between Canada and the United States, Final Report” (November 2008), 78 pp., www.policyresearch.gc.ca. See also D. K. Alper, “The Idea of Cascadia: Emergent Regionalisms in the Pacific Northwest-Western Canada,” Journal of Borderland Studies 11, no. 2 (1996): 1-22; S. E. Clarke, “Regional and Transnational Discourse: The Politics of Ideas and Economic Development in Cascadia,” International Journal of Economic Development 2, no. 3 (2000): 360-378; H. Nicol, “Resiliency or Change? The Contemporary Canada-U.S. Border,” Geopolitics 10 (2005): 767-790; V. Conrad, H. N. Nicol, Beyond Walls: Re-inventing the Canada-United States Borderlands (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008), 360 pp.
427 See www.atlantica.org.
428 This discovery of common sociocultural values within cross-border superregions is based on survey data, Government of Canada, Policy Research Initiative, “The Emergence of Cross-Border Regions between Canada and the United States,” Final Report (November 2008), 78 pp, www.policyresearch.gc.ca.
429 The U.S. State Department recently quelled any hint of a U.S. claim to a half-dozen islands off Russia’s Arctic coast, even though Americans were involved with the discovery and exploration of some of them. “Status of Wrangel and Other Arctic Islands,” U.S. Department of State, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, Washington, D.C., May 20, 2003. While Canadian politicians like to fret about protecting Canada’s vast northern territories from the United States and Russia, there is little evidence that either country has designs on them. Indeed, the United States provides tacit military backing of Canadian sovereignty there. For more on the relative success of U.S.-Canada relations, see K. S. Coates et al., Arctic Front: Defending Canada in the Far North (Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2008), 261 pp. However, while the likelihood of conflict between Arctic nation-states is low, there is ongoing domestic tension from aboriginal groups over land title, as is discussed in Chapter 8.
430 Another area of increasing cross-border economic ties is between Russia and the U.S., with Chukotka Autonomous Okrug in the Russian Far East increasingly importing fuel and other supplies from Alaska. J. Newell, The Russian Far East (Simi Valley, Calif.: Daniel & Daniel Publishers, Inc., 2004), 466 pp.
431 This table was constructed using data from the following sources: 2009 Index of Economic Freedom, Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal (179 countries, www.heritage.org); 2008 Economic Freedom of the World Index (141 countries, http://www.freetheworld.com/2008/EconomicFreedomoftheWorld2008.pdf); 2009 KOF Index of Globalization (208 countries, http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch/); 2009 Global Peace Index (144 countries, http://www.visionofhumanity.org/gpi/results/rankings.php); 2008 Economist