| ENVIRONMENT: Research group calls Alberta’s oil sands “Canada's most serious environmental liability |
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(AlbertaIndex, February 27, Thursday) --- Environmental Defence, a Toronto-based environmental research group, has described the exploitation of Alberta’s oil sands as Canada’s most serious environmental liability.
In a special report, the group said oil produced from the bitumen lying beneath Alberta’s boreal forest is one of the dirtiest fuels in the world. Extracting one barrel of crude requires two or more barrels of fresh water from the nearby Athabasca River and 750 cubic feet of non-renewable natural gas. Approximately 3,000 square kilometres of Alberta’s boreal forest have been leased for oil sands mining and another 35,000 square kilometres are available for future development. Wetlands developed for oil sand operations are permanently damaged and cannot be restored to their original state. There is growing concern about social and health issues associated with the oil sands, including reports of increased cancer rates among aboriginal residents living downstream. The report said tailing ponds, the large, man-made lakes that store the fouled waste water left over from the extraction process, are highly toxic, cannot support life and cover an area of over 50 square kilometres. The extraction of oil from oil sands produces four times more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil extraction, and these emissions are on the rise. Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence, said: “Few Canadians know that Canada is home to one of the world’s largest dams and it is built to hold toxic waste from just one tar sands operation. There is nowhere else on Earth where you have toxic ponds that are so big that you can now see them from space.” The Alberta government plans to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies to reduce air borne emissions and to help boost conventional oil extraction by injecting carbon dioxide into declining oil fields. Although such technologies hold great promise according to the National Energy Board they are decades away from widespread usage. Environmental Defence cited Tom d’Aquino, President of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, in its statement that some businesses are becoming hesitant about investing in Canada because of ‘policy chaos’ on climate change created by the federal and provincial governments. “This is affecting investment plans. How can you make investment decisions on a 15 or 20 or 25-year horizon if you are living in a country that is totally fragmented on environmental policy? The danger is that of some people saying if Canada can’t get it together, maybe we should go somewhere else. People have actually said that to me.” Environmental Defence said in the long run, business as usual in the oil patch is untenable. Public interest in the environmental impacts associated with oil sands extraction will only increase and intensify the polarization of opinion about energy versus the environment. Energy and the environment will be a major theme at the upcoming GLOBE 2008 conference in Toronto in March 2008. Several sessions will address this critically important issue including a Corporate Dialogue on increasing the supply of clean energy, raising energy efficiency, and reducing pollution from conventional energy sources a panel on climate change policy and regulatory trends in North America and a session on carbon capture and storage from coal plants, oil sands production and other significant energy operations. Did you enjoy this article? Please share it!         |
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