Of Canada's 175 billion barrels of oil that can be recovered, 170 billion barrels come from the oil sands in the Alberta region. Canada has about 9 times as much proven oil reserves as the United States (around 22 billion barrels). The country has enough oil to fuel its own oil demand for about 266 years (if they stopped exporting their oil).Canada has enough oil to fuel its own oil demand for about 266 years (if they stopped exporting their oil). New oil sands development is expected to generate $84 billion per year — enough to feed more than 90% of Canadian households for one year. Canada supplies 25% of U.S. crude oil imports, more than double that of Saudi Arabia. he oil sands cover 54,826 square miles, an area bigger than England and almost the size of Florida. It takes about two tons of mined oil sands to produce one barrel of crude oil. One operating mine in Alberta has excavated more soil than the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Great Wall of China, the Suez Canal and the world’s 10 biggest dams combined. Oil sands operations divert 349 million cubic meters of water per year from the local river — twice that used by the city of Calgary. The total size of the lakes made from oil extraction is bigger than Vancouver. Producing a barrel of tar sand oil emits three times more greenhouse gases than producing a barrel of conventional oil. Oil sands production uses enough natural gas in a day to heat 3 million homes in Canada.The world's oil sands production went up 225% in the last decade.
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In the 2010, an international oil pipeline managed by the Canadian company Enbridge Inc. ruptured in the state of Michigan, dumping more than one million gallons of thick, asphalt-like oil into the Kalamazoo River. The environmental impact on the contiguous environment was devastating. Scores of birds, fish and other wildlife were either oiled or killed. Residents in the otherwise peaceful Michigan hinterlands were forced to evacuate as toxic levels of benzene infected the surrounding air. The local Kelloggs factory in Battle Creek, had to stop making corn flakes. It had all the destruction of the British Petroleum catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico but a fraction of the press. On October 31, 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency suspended its mission to recover all of the oil leaked during the Enbridge tar sands oil spill disaster due to winter conditions.They have contained more than 1,139,000 gallons of oil from the spill, found in oily river and tributary water, soil, sediment and debris, but estimate that the containment process will continue much into 2012. After over a million gallons of containment, there is still more viscous oil deposited in the banks of the Kalamazoo.
The Keystone XL, a pipeline that would travel 1,700 miles from the Athabasca oil sands, through seven states – Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas – and have the capacity to transport 800,000 barrels of oil a day, has ignited protest by the environmental community. If built, Keystone XL is slated to run along the Ogallala Aquifer, also known as the High Plains Aquifer; the vast water system is a shallow underground aquifer located beneath the Great Plains that supplies water to the Midwest. A contamination by a tar sands pipeline spill into the Ogallala, as seen in Michigan with Enbridge, would be cataclysmal. As it stands now, no further decision-making is planned for Keystone XL until 2013, after the presidential election. But with oil prices continuing to skyrocket, Alberta’s oil tars comes with a motivating fact: they are the second biggest deposit of carbon on the planet, second only to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.
“Extracting oil from tar sands is literally like scrapeing the bottom of the barrel,” explained Lena Moffitt, the Sierra Club’s representative in Washington D.C. “It’s both difficult and expensive to extract and transport. Essentially it’s the oil industry getting desperate,” Moffitt said.
Alberta province has committed 220,000 sq.km of its boreal forest to be cut down over the next 60 years, according to a report by the Taiga Biological Station. That commitment threatens the very existence of Alberta’s wildlife and the villages of many indigenous human populations.
Extraction carries with it very high environmental costs. The process of turning the tar harvested into oil emits very high levels of CO2. The refining process and the pumping steam into the ground also require huge amounts water. In fact, when compared toe-to-toe, tar sands oil – and the processes involved in their extraction – is actually worse for the environment that offshore drilling, Alex Sessions, a professor of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech University admitted.
Source
Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.
Source
In the 2010, an international oil pipeline managed by the Canadian company Enbridge Inc. ruptured in the state of Michigan, dumping more than one million gallons of thick, asphalt-like oil into the Kalamazoo River. The environmental impact on the contiguous environment was devastating. Scores of birds, fish and other wildlife were either oiled or killed. Residents in the otherwise peaceful Michigan hinterlands were forced to evacuate as toxic levels of benzene infected the surrounding air. The local Kelloggs factory in Battle Creek, had to stop making corn flakes. It had all the destruction of the British Petroleum catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico but a fraction of the press. On October 31, 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency suspended its mission to recover all of the oil leaked during the Enbridge tar sands oil spill disaster due to winter conditions.They have contained more than 1,139,000 gallons of oil from the spill, found in oily river and tributary water, soil, sediment and debris, but estimate that the containment process will continue much into 2012. After over a million gallons of containment, there is still more viscous oil deposited in the banks of the Kalamazoo.
The Keystone XL, a pipeline that would travel 1,700 miles from the Athabasca oil sands, through seven states – Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas – and have the capacity to transport 800,000 barrels of oil a day, has ignited protest by the environmental community. If built, Keystone XL is slated to run along the Ogallala Aquifer, also known as the High Plains Aquifer; the vast water system is a shallow underground aquifer located beneath the Great Plains that supplies water to the Midwest. A contamination by a tar sands pipeline spill into the Ogallala, as seen in Michigan with Enbridge, would be cataclysmal. As it stands now, no further decision-making is planned for Keystone XL until 2013, after the presidential election. But with oil prices continuing to skyrocket, Alberta’s oil tars comes with a motivating fact: they are the second biggest deposit of carbon on the planet, second only to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.
“Extracting oil from tar sands is literally like scrapeing the bottom of the barrel,” explained Lena Moffitt, the Sierra Club’s representative in Washington D.C. “It’s both difficult and expensive to extract and transport. Essentially it’s the oil industry getting desperate,” Moffitt said.
Alberta province has committed 220,000 sq.km of its boreal forest to be cut down over the next 60 years, according to a report by the Taiga Biological Station. That commitment threatens the very existence of Alberta’s wildlife and the villages of many indigenous human populations.
Extraction carries with it very high environmental costs. The process of turning the tar harvested into oil emits very high levels of CO2. The refining process and the pumping steam into the ground also require huge amounts water. In fact, when compared toe-to-toe, tar sands oil – and the processes involved in their extraction – is actually worse for the environment that offshore drilling, Alex Sessions, a professor of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech University admitted.
Source
Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.
2 comments:
We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.
Wtf?????
mea culpa...it was bad editing on my behalf of an article which recommended such reforms, and then no double check by myself of the draft before posting on the blog. SOYMB of course does not think relying on the market can solve anything. I will delete the offending paragraph for future readers. Apologies for the confusion
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