Oil Sands: Environment Is in Danger

Darkhan Urmurzin

Instructor: Genevieve Depelteau

Geography 100

6 December 2013

Oil Sands: Environment Is in Danger.

Oil is one of the most essential resources that human uses in a daily basis to satisfy nowadays vital needs. Being such an important resource, the quantity of consumable oil is rising very fast. Today, the world faces a forecasting problem of oil shortage in the future, so people have to find alternative sources of oil production. Oil sands are one of the most attainable alternative resources that people can produce in our time. The industry of production of the tar sands is progressing very fast, and as it progresses, there occur a lot of debatable issues among the consumers and producers. One of the most disturbing questions is the sustainability of the production of bitumen extracted from the oil sands. The Canadian oil reserves take the third place in the world with 168.7 billion barrels. 98% of these resources come from Alberta. In addition to that fact, majority of the Alberta’s resources come from the oil sands (“Alberta’s Energy Reserves 2011 and Supply/Demand Outlook 2012-2021”).  Knowing the fact that North America is so hungry for oil, a lot of people a delighted with the fact of mining Alberta’s reserves. But there occurs the problem: the growth of environmental and social costs causes the protest, which is growing very fast. “Such voices are not new: Larry Pratt’s critique, written in 1976, could have been written today” (Sinclair 72). People are concerned about the environmental and social impacts of the oil sands industry: recent investigations show that this industry is unsustainable. According to data from the article “Tar Sands 2011”: “The oil sands mining procedure releases at least three times the CO2 emissions as regular oil production, it is already slated to be the cause of up to the second fastest rate of deforestation on the planet behind the Amazon Rainforest Basin and its production has led to many serious social issues throughout Alberta, from housing crises to the vast expansion of temporary foreign worker programs that racialize and exploit so-called non-citizens.” These facts play an important role in the debates among society, revealing environmental, economical and social issues that the tar sands industry causes.

To start with, what is oil sand itself? According to the Alberta’s Government Web Site oil sand is “a naturally occurring mixture of sand, clay or other minerals, water and bitumen, which is a heavy and extremely viscous oil that must be treated before it can be used by refineries to produce usable fuels such as gasoline and diesel”. This resource is widely spread in Alberta: Fort McMurray, Athabasca River Basin, Peace River Basin, and Cold Lake Area, covering nearly 140,200 square kilometers of northern Alberta forest (“A Comprehensive Guide to Alberta Oil Sands”). In fact, this territory is bigger that England (Sinclair 67). That huge amount of resources makes Canada one of the leaders in the tar sands industry. Of course, Alberta’s reserves are very profitable and this is one of the points that are used by government to show the efficiency of oil sands. But, on the other hand, bitumen needs a very expensive processing operation to extract usable feedstock. This process depends on the natural gas, which supplies heat and steam to remove carbon or add the hydrogen. “The open-pit mining method of obtaining the bitumen requires stripping away all surface material until the oil-bearing sands are exposed” (Sinclair 71). This process may require up to 75 meters of mining, leaving the waste known as tails. This method also involves a large usage of water and heat energy. To extract bitumen, it should be at first changed: the viscosity should be reduced, usually by heating it with steam. This method is not efficient not only because it allows extracting only 20-25% of bitumen (Sinclair 72), but also because of the fact that it requires 5 litres of water to produce one litre of usable petroleum (“Oil Sands Truth”).  As we can see the oil sands production is very expensive, often exceeding its budget. But as the Minister of Energy states: