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Dirty Oil Video: Canada's Tar Sands Explained
As President Obama prepares for his first foreign trip to Canada on Thursday, attention is focusing on the biggest energy and environmental issue on the North American continent: Canada's vast deposits of tar sands.
About 10% of U.S. oil imports now originate from this dirty source. Restricting use of the highly polluting supply will be essential if the president is going to meet his greenhouse gas reduction targets. How Obama deals with the issue in his talks with Canadian Prime Minister Harper could demonstrate how the president intends to scale back on fossil fuel energy development as the clean energy economy expands.
Required reading on the subject is the book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent by Andrew Nikiforuk which was published to wide acclaim in Canada in the fall and is slated for release in the U.S. in March. It details the impact that the $200 billion of oil money that has poured into the region has had in creating the world's largest energy project and one of its dirtiest and most dangerous.
By all means order the book and read it; and while you're waiting for it to arrive, watch this video which Nikiforuk produced.
See also:
A Must-Read Book on Tar Sands for Obama Before His Trip to Canada
A Tale of Two Disasters: Coal Ash and Tar Sands Tailings
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Oil Sands Development
Somehow it always comes down to the best of two worlds. We choose one thing over another and hopefully we make the correct choice. Right now, we have the capability and the technology to drill almost wherever we want and get oil. The technology has been proven to be relatively safe for many years with a minimal number of accidents. I'm not talking about Valdez, because that may still happen if we have to bring oil from Saudi Arabia in ships, and give more dollars to the Arab oil world.
This so-called BP incident in my mind appears to be an accident by design, since BP did not heed all the warnings that indicated a pending catastrophe. BP has a stake in cap and trade and carbon footprint legislations. The Federal government’s slow reaction, should I say non-existent reaction, is what has caused a larger disaster, one which could have been avoided to such an extent and points to the idiocy that exists in our leadership.
The way that things are done in our free market society is that people with ideas bring them to the market, with their own money, so they have a stake in their business and if successful, the marketplace will reward them accordingly. To force the public through governmental interference, meaning taxation through cap and trade, so that money can be funneled to possible inventors with ideas is not an efficient way in my thinking.
The Oil Sands Pipeline seems to be a more acceptable solution than purchasing oil from the Middle East for strategic as well as economic reasons. Environmentally speaking, it makes no sense to stop a project of this type for approximately 0.4 barrels of oil per mile per year. The contamination to the aquifer due to this amount of oil would be minimal.
As for the 250 members of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), I would suggest that they establish their own companies with their own dollars instead of my dollars. Otherwise, I would like to see their business plan as well as scientific proof of what they are producing so I can invest on my own and not be forced by any governmental agency into participating in making them wealthy. That’s the American system. I know what they do in Europe and they can stay there. We are not socialists.
John M. Kanterakis, proud American
Oil Sands Development
Easy to throw stones. How about a viable solution? You say 3 barrels of water are used for every barrel of oil produced but miss to mention that 97% of that water is now recovered for reuse. How about the gasification process in wich synthetic natural gas is produced and burned for energy in the prodution of synthetic crude. Technology can and will help develop the oil sand resource that our children will prosper. Or do you wish that we just go back to the caveman era?
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