The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [99]
Extracting liquid oils from this mess is an extraordinarily invasive, consumptive, and environmentally damaging process. At present, the most common way to do it is strip mining, with about two tons of tar sand needed to obtain a single barrel of oil. Gigantic trucks and shovels scrape the stuff off the surface. Then it is crushed and dumped onto conveyor belts heading to swirling tubs of water. The resulting slurry is piped to an extraction facility, where it is churned in a heated witches’ brew of steam, water, and caustic soda. This splits the bitumen from the sand and clay, which sink to the bottom. The bitumen floats off to an “upgrader” (a sort of refinery) to remove sulfur and add hydrogen (from natural gas), creating synthetic crude oil. The waste liquid and dirt are sent to tailings ponds; the yellow blocks of sulfur are simply stacked up.417
Tar sands are an environmentalist’s nightmare. The extraction process gobbles enormous quantities of energy and water. Migratory birds land in the tailings ponds and die.418 Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates are released into the air alongside up to three times more greenhouse gas than released by conventional oil drilling. Depending on the technology used, it takes 2-4 cubic meters of water, and 125-214 cubic meters of natural gas, to produce a single cubic meter of synthetic oil.
The water is pumped from groundwater or diverted from the Athabasca River, reducing inflow to the Peace-Athabasca Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Ramsar wetland, about 150 kilometers downstream.419 Most mines will operate for about forty years and excavate about a hundred square kilometers of land. No tailings ponds have ever been fully reclaimed, and putting the overburden back afterward mitigates the damage but does not really restore the original ecosystem. Since 1967, when the first mining began, only one square kilometer has been certifiably restored and returned to the public.420 These and other problems have environmental organizations yowling against any further increase in tar sands production.
They face a difficult battle. Short of being outlawed, it’s hard to imagine how the growth of this industry will ever stop. The oil reserves the tar sands contain are estimated at an astonishing 175 billion barrels which, if correct and recoverable, is the second-largest oil endowment on Earth after Saudi Arabia (estimated at 264 billion barrels). That means Alberta holds more oil than Iraq (115 billion barrels), Kuwait (102 billion), Venezuela (99 billion), Russia (79 billion), or Norway (7.5 billion). The cost to produce it has dropped from thirty-five dollars per barrel in 1980 to twenty dollars per barrel in recent years, making even fifty-dollars-per-barrel oil prices very profitable.421 Huge new supplies of natural gas, needed for energy and hydrogen, will come online with construction of the Mackenzie Gas Project, a long-anticipated 1,220-kilometer pipeline that will carry Arctic gas from the Mackenzie Delta area to the tar sands and other North American markets. 422 History tells us that Canada’s adherence to international climate-change treaties crumbles before market forces like these: The tar sands are the biggest reason why Canada not only failed to meet her pledged reduction in carbon dioxide emissions under the Kyoto Protocol (to -6% below 1990 levels), but actually grew them +27% instead.423
So far, about 530 square kilometers have been strip-mined, an area not much greater than the city of Edmonton. But tar sands underlie a staggering 140,000 square kilometers of Alberta, nearly one-fourth of the province and about the size of Bangladesh. Of this large area, about 20%—sixty more Edmontons—are shallow enough for strip mining. The rest can be exploited using underground extraction, which involves injecting 450°F pressurized steam underground for several years to heat the ground, eventually fluidizing the tar enough to pump some of it out.424