Tarred and Oiled

The portion of the Andrew Leonard/How the World Works text mentioned in my Tierney post below comes from a larger post about Canadian oil-sands deposits, which I found very interesting and worthy of a separate post. The short version--oil extracted from difficult tar sands is becoming more and more affordable in the context of the global rise in oil prices, but it has a potentially higher cost:

These vast mixtures of sand and bitumen used to be known by the more accurate name of "tar sands" until the provincial government decided that moniker was too dirty. But whatever you call them, they are huge: There are proven reserves of some 174 billion barrels of oil in the province of Alberta, giving Canada oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia. Even before President Bush's State of the Union address calling for an end to Mideast oil dependence, Canada's oil sands were benefiting from high oil prices and maturing extraction technologies. The fact that oil-sands mining is conducted by private companies has also made the sector very attractive to foreign investors looking to lock up future sources of energy. Chinese oil companies have already cut three separate deals with Canadian companies, including one to build a pipeline from Edmonton to the West Coast. On Jan. 30, India's oil minister announced plans to invest a billion dollars in Canadian oil-sands production.

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The larger issue is that extracting oil from Canadian oil sands is possibly the most environmentally destructive form of mining ever practiced. High oil prices: good for solar, but also good for the wiping out hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine boreal forest.

Oil-sands mining involves separating out the tar, or bitumen, from the sand. Where the deposits are relatively shallow, this involves the complete removal of everything on the surface -- strip mining on a nearly inconceivable scale. Where the deposits are deep, a different process is employed, known as "in situ" mining, that is only marginally less destructive. All together, oil-sands mining is hugely energy intensive, causes massive air pollution, consumes vast amounts of fresh water, and results in gigantic concentrations of toxic "tailings" -- the leftover sludge that remains after the bitumen has been successfully extracted. Canada has been a vocal supporter of the Kyoto accords, but if Albertan oil-sands production continues to surge forward at predicted rates, the greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution caused there will dwarf any cutbacks in emissions elsewhere in the nation.