Andrew Nikiforuk's articles

The governments of Alberta and Canada have championed carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a creative solution to the growing clouds of greenhouse gases from bitumen production in the tar sands.

Bitumen is one of the world’s dirtiest hydrocarbons, producing two to six times more climate changing gases than light oil. So Canadians, the chief exporters of “dirty oil” to the United States, keenly want to start a clean energy dialogue with President Barack Obama. They made their first overture last month when the U.S. president visited Ottawa and agreed to collaborate on developing energy technology, including CCS.

Alberta, home to the tar sands, proposes to clean up its ugly bitumen with the magic of this largely unproven technology. Local politicians now boast that Alberta is the only jurisdiction in the world to have set aside $2 billion of taxpayer’s money to give carbon a proper funeral in a secure cemetery: old oil formations or salt aquifers.

But fools often rush in where Angels fear to tread.

Chasing CCS is a money burner and an energy hog, and it may not deliver much carbon savings. The whole reactive proposition raises extreme security and liability issues for industry and taxpayers alike.

Just about every agency in Canada has expressed alarm about water use in the tar sands.

The Petroleum Technology Alliance of Canada, a Calgary-based nonprofit research group, declares water use and reuse to be the region’s biggest issue, because “bitumen production can be much more fresh water intensive than other oil production operations.”

The National Energy Board, no radical group, has questioned the sustainability of water withdrawals for bitumen mining.

The World Wildlife Fund warns that warming temperatures “will significantly reduce both water quality and water quantity in the region.”

Downstream users are already sounding alarm bells about water quality.

“Everybody is convinced that the oil sands is having an impact on the basin,” says Michael Miltenberger, minister of environment and natural resources for the government of the Northwest Territories. “We have tremendous concerns in terms of the pace of development and contamination issues. What happens on the Athabasca affects people as far away as Inuvik.”

The open-pit mines that scar the banks of the Athabasca River north of Fort McMurray are water consumers as formidable as California irrigation projects.

To appreciate the world-class impact of the tar sands on the globe’s third-largest watershed, it’s instructive to look first at the hardwood forests of Appalachia.

That’s where the coal industry has practiced an unconventional mining technique known as mountaintop removal since the 1980s. The industry swears that the innovation is cheaper and safer than digging underground.

Mountaintop removal and open-pit bitumen mining are classic forms of strip mining, with a few key differences.

Few issues illustrate the dirty nature of bitumen production better than growing lakes of toxic mining waste along the Athabasca River in northern Canada.

These industry-made impoundments now contain 187 billion gallons of sludge that includes phenols, arsenic, mercury, cancer-makers such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and fish-killing naphthenic acids.

The dams not only pose multibillion-dollar liabilities for investors but also threaten water quality in the world’s third largest watershed, the Mackenzie River Basin. Their determined accumulation also confirms a genuine state of regulatory neglect in the tar sands, the world’s largest energy project and number one supplier of U.S. oil.

America’s increasing reliance on Alberta’s tar sands directly challenges President Obama’s vow to break the U.S. addiction to “dirty, dwindling and dangerously expensive” oil.

For this reason, the world’s largest energy project will likely dominate political discussions between Canada and the United States for a long time.

Seven years ago, Canada quietly surpassed Saudi Arabia as the United States’ major supplier of oil by rapidly exploiting shallow deposits of a tarry bitumen that industry calls “difficult oil.” This badly degraded, unconventional resource has little market value unless extensively upgraded and refined. It won’t even move through a pipeline without being diluted by light oil.

A switch from bloody light oil to dirty heavy oil has many defenders. For starters, Canada’s tar sands, the world’s second-largest petroleum reserve, are a vast and secure resource. No money spent on Canadian bitumen would be redirected to fundamentalist sects or Middle East insurgencies.

But replacing Saudia Arabia’s tainted light oil with bitumen is no direct pipeline to energy security. It’s more like switching your family’s mortgage from Countrywide Financial to Bear Stearns.

The million-barrel-a-day project, which produces the world’s most expensive oil, is creating monstrous environmental problems.