Energy Probe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
September 13, 2008

The public debate on oil sands fails to recognize that restoration is possible and not that expensive.

Alberta’s oil sands projects are ugly. Their tailings ponds pockmark the northern Alberta wilderness. Their open pit mines scar the land. This certifiable ugliness, the trademark symbol of oil sands destruction, has been the chief source of opposition to their development over the three decades that this rawest of resource industries has been in play.

This reason for oil sands opposition has largely disappeared. Oil sands still scar the land but in time the scars are removed, the tailings ponds are drained, the biota is brought back, and the land becomes as productive as before. Oil sands developments, far from being among the worst of energy technologies, now have less of a long-term negative impact on the landscape than many of the energy technologies touted as environmental saviors.

Thanks to ever tightening environmental legislation from the Alberta government, all oil sands operators are required to rehabilitate the land that they had despoiled. Skeptics pooh pooh this obligation, claiming that the scale of destruction on the vast oil sands expanse will be too great to ever remediate, that the work will never be done, that it will be too expensive.

To the contrary, the scale of destruction is far less extensive than imagined, the cost of remediation is far lower than imagined, and the remediation is being done along the way.

The oil sands region is indeed immense — just over 140,000 square kilometres, the equivalent of about two New Brunswicks. But of that, less than 3,500 square kilometres is suited to open pit mining operations. Of this still-large amount of land — approaching 5% of one New Brunswick — only 500 square kilometers has been disturbed to date and, of that, 13% has already been rehabilitated (Syncrude, the largest open-pit miner, has rehabilitated 22%). Relatively little land is laid bare at one time because the mining proceeds in a methodical fashion, in relatively small parcels at a time. After each parcel of land is mined out, it is backfilled, topped with the original over-matter, resoiled and replanted. While the vanguard of the mining operation chews up the land, the rearguard puts it back into place.

From the first shovel in the ground to begin the mining process, to the last tree that’s replanted, can take as little as 15 years, of which 10 years might be spent in remediation. The cost of the remediation per hectare per year now averages about: $2000, or $20,000 should the remediation take 10 years. Because that same hectare will have produced 10,000 barrels of oil, remediation costs as little as $2 per barrel.

The tailings ponds — better thought of as recycling pits — are part of this extract-and-reconstruct process. The ponds are not stagnant but dynamic, a half-way house for the gooey, silty wastes that come from the open-pit mining process. Over time, the solids in the tailings pond settle to the bottom, allowing the water to be recycled for other industrial operations and the solids to be pumped out for backfill. When the ponds are no longer needed in recycling, they are either topped up with fresh water, to become an ecologically sound lake, or backfilled and landscaped.

The overwhelming portion of the oil sands region — more than 135,000 square kilometres — has bitumen deposits too deep for open pit mining. Here, developers bring the bitumen up through wells, an operation not much different in terms of disturbing the land than the conventional oil drilling that has occurred over much of Alberta for decades. Little land is disturbed. For every billion barrels of oil extracted, and most oil sands oil will come from these wells, a mere 5.5 square kilometres of land will be disturbed.

None of this is pretty or easy on the environment, but energy production rarely is. Alternatives are often far worse and, as a practical matter, represent permanent and irreversible changes to the ecology. To obtain coal, we sometimes level entire mountains. To generate hydroelectricity, we flood vast tracts of river valley. To obtain, biofuels we convert forests to plant fuel crops.

Oil sands’ need to restore land is only one of its environmental burdens. This spring, some 500 migratory birds died when they landed in Syncrude’s tailings ponds — a severe snowstorm prevented the company’s vehicles from reaching the ponds in time to detonate the cannons that, for the previous 30 years, had succeeded in keeping birds away. Accidents might occur at the tailings ponds — recycled water might escape to the environment if safety systems fail, for example.

Oil sands are by no stretch benign. But neither are they the overarching evil that they’re portrayed to be.

Second in a series, also featuring:

Sands of peace

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
September 6, 2008

Russia’s energy supplies enabled their aggression, Canada’s supply could be the placating alternative.

“When it comes to action over Georgia, Russia has the European Union over a barrel. In fact, 1.2 million barrels. That’s how much Russian crude is pumped westward every day down the Druzhba pipeline to fuel Europe’s economies.”

So began an article in the International Herald Tribune, one of many last week explaining why Europe — and the west — has little choice but to sacrifice parts of Georgia, and maybe a lot more, to Russia’s ambitions.

“Russia knows that when it comes to conducting a serious foreign and security policy, Europe is all mouth,” says Lord Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former EU external relations commissioner. This impotence emboldens Russia and revives its centuries-long drive to control neighbouring states.

A new Cold War looms, many are concluding, financed by Russia’s new found energy wealth and fueled by appeasement. Is the free world doomed to decades of hostility due to Europe’s energy vulnerability?

1.2 million barrels of oil a day is a lot. Or not. Alberta’s might as an energy power is now based largely on the ongoing development of just seven oil sands projects, most of them on the ultimate scale of 300,000 to 400,000 barrels of oil a day. Add three or four projects from Alberta on that scale to produce another 1.2 million barrels of oil per day and Europe’s entire oil dependence on Russia can be eradicated. A democratic peace-promoting country would have come to Europe’s rescue, providing not just oil but the steel needed in Europe’s spine.

The oil would do more than loosen Europe from the grips of an untrustworthy supplier who has shown no hesitation in using its energy exports to bully its customers — the Ukraine, Georgia, and Estonia have all felt Russia’s wrath. With an immense addition to the world oil markets from Alberta, oil prices will plummet along with the need for appeasement, in the process weakening despotic and militaristic regimes. High oil prices arm despots against their own people, as with Burma’s military regime; they finance terrorism abroad, as with Iran; and they make dreams of empire thinkable, as with Russia.

Pictured: The world’s longest conveyer belt at the Muskeg River Mine project in Alberta.

Canada’s oil sands are rightly known for the immense environmental problems that they pose. They should also be known for their role in promoting peace and security around the globe. Canada already exports some 2.5 million barrels of oil a day to U. S., more than half of it from oil sands, providing the Americans with a secure supplier that reduces its need to intervene militarily in far-flung oil-producing regions.

Energy security remains a top political issues in the U. S. One of Barack Obama’s central pledges in his acceptance
speech last week was getting off Mideast oil in a decade. The U. S. imports some two million barrels of Mideast oil per day. In a decade, if the Alberta government’s plans come through, that entire two million barrels could come from increases in Alberta oil sands production alone. In another decade, Alberta hopes to expand its production by another three million barrels per day. Advancing just 1.2 million of that three million for the sake of Europe, and for the cause of peace, should become an imperative.

In the 1980s, when oil from oil sands cost about $30 a barrel, and oil prices were often in the $20 to $30 range, oil sands required economic subsidies to be viable business propositions, even ignoring their environmental harm. With oil now at $100 per barrel and production costs about $10 a barrel and expected to fall further, the profitability of oil sands is immense. No subsidies can be justified, economic or environmental.

Oil sands have a host of problems. These include known harms — they consume and pollute too much water, they despoil too much land — and they include one potential harm — greenhouse gases, which many scientists believe can cause the planet to warm dangerously. But problems have a way of getting solved, as we’ve seen with coal. Once the dirtiest of fuels, coal can now be burned cleanly, thanks to improvements in technology. Clean coal has the same emissions profile as natural gas, and it is getting cleaner still.

Oil sands are following the same route to rehabilitation. They still consumes too much water, but less than half as much as before. Although some 500 square kilometres of land has been despoiled to date, land is also beginning to be rehabilitated, as it must under the terms of the agreements that the producers signed with the government — Syncrude has reclaimed some 4,500 hectares at its site north of Fort McMurray, with impressive results. Greenhouse gas emissions are being halved.

Alberta’s oil sands represent one of the planet’s largest reservoirs of energy — some 2.5 trillion barrels of crude bitumen from which 300 billion barrels are estimated to be available, an amount that rivals the reserves of Saudi Arabia. They need to be developed properly: cleanly, to protect the environment, and quickly, to promote peace and stability.

Photo credit: Ted Jacob, Canwest News Service

First in a series, also featuring:

Oil sands cleanup

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.