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Air Sand
Tar Sands – Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel
Sitting beneath the pristine boreal forest of Alberta, Canada are the world's second largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. Reserves the governments of Alberta and Canada and virtually every major oil company in the world want to exploit - despite it risking runaway climate change and a local ecological disaster.
These reserves are not crude oil you can just pump out of the ground but tar sands, a complex mixture of sand, water, clay and bitumen. To extract the low quality tarry bitumen and upgrade it into synthetic crude oil suitable for refining into petroleum products is a very dirty and energy intensive process.
First the tar sands must either be extracted by open cast mining, or, for deeper deposits, exploited in-situ by pumping huge quantities of steam into the ground to loosen the bitumen before pumping it out. The result is three to five times more greenhouse gas emissions per barrel of oil compared to conventional oil production.
At a time when we urgently need to shift to a low carbon economy the oil industry is actually increasing the carbon emissions of its products, negating efforts being made elsewhere to reduce emissions. Canada, once considered a progressive country on environmental issues, is now emitting over 30% more carbon than its Kyoto protocol target. Canada officially abandoned its Kyoto commitment in 2007 and is now lobbying against international climate change legislation that would penalise tar sands derived fuels, such as the European Fuel Quality Directive and California Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which seek to reduce the emissions of transport fuels.
The highly respected NASA climate scientist, James Hansen, has described the tar sands as "one of our planet's greatest threats", which, if exploited "would initiate a continual unfolding of climate disasters over the course of the century." Yet virtually every major oil company in the world has tar sands operations or plans to develop them. Current production stands at 1.7 million barrels of oil per day - oil companies have announced plans to increase this to 7.5 million per day.
In addition to the climate change implications of tar sands exploitation, expanding developments also threatens disaster for the local environment. Pristine boreal forest is being degraded and destroyed over a vast area threatening extinction for the woodland caribou in Alberta. Huge quantities of fresh water is being taken from local rivers, most of which becomes too toxic to return and instead is stored in vast man made lakes of toxic waste, which now cover a surface area of 172 km2. These lakes are acutely toxic to all life that comes into contact with them, leading to thousands of waterfowl deaths. Millions of litres of this toxic waste also leech into the wider environment everyday. There is also significant pollution to the air including dangerous particulates and heavy metals, which has been described as the equivalent of a major oil spill into the local environment every year.
This all has a profound effect on local wildlife and First Nation communities, such as the Beaver Lake Cree, threatening their culture, traditional way of life and wellbeing. Their elders talk about the air not being as good as it used to be, there is an oily residue on plants and trees, the large mammals they hunt are increasingly found to be sick, and they won't drink the water from the muskeg anymore. They know their environment is under great threat, and they fear for future generations.
In 1876, the Beaver Lake Cree signed a treaty with representatives of Queen Victoria ceding vast tracts of land in return for guaranteed rights to hunt, fish and gather plants and medicines on these lands, as they had always done. These ancestral lands are now being destroyed by tar sands developments. Not willing to stand by and watch this destruction, the Beaver Lake Cree have commenced a legal challenge to enforce recognition of their treaty rights, which requires the preservation of their ancestral lands. They have also launched court proceedings to protect the critical habitat of the threatened woodland caribou. If the Beaver Lake Cree are successful not only will they have protected their environment and traditional way of life for future generations, they will also have massively curtailed the oil industry's expansion plans for the tar sands.
This is a real David vs Goliath battle with a small impoverished community taking on not only the governments of Alberta and Canada, but also some of the world's largest companies.
Join The Revolution and find out more about campaigns to stop tar sands expansion.
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