Tar Sands: dirty oil and the future of a continent - Andrew Nikiforuk

They are called oil sands now, a more palatable name than tar sands, but author Andrew Nikiforuk uses the old name to more accurately describe the resource that is the centre of such controversy and political posturing.

Andrew Nikiforuk is a respected award-winning journalist and author who has been writing about economics and the environment for the past twenty years. His fearless tackling of environmental issues has gained him a great deal of recognition (some may say notoriety) in Canada, particularly in his home province of Alberta. Regular CBC radio listeners will no doubt recognise him as the environmental columnist for the daily provincial public affairs program, Wild Rose.

And now he has written one of the most sobering books that I have ever read, but one that has jolted me out of my complacency and into action. Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, is a short (216 pages) but thorough examination of the most contentious and problematic issue that the world is facing – how to handle the cursed legacy of the Alberta tar sands.

To launch the release of this book last month, Greystone Books offered a free download of the entire missive for a limited time. That window has now passed, but you can still preview selected pages at Google Books. And I would urge you to do that.

The reality of peak oil has made the recovery of bitumen from the sands of northern Alberta very attractive. It is in fact the world’s last great oil reserve. But this is not easily drilled, free-flowing oil. Bitumen is closely bound with sand and clay and shale, and the mining of bitumen involves the deforestation of huge tracts of lands, the removal of acres upon acres of top soil, the drainage of vital wetlands, and the washing out of the bitumen with millions of gallons of water from the Athabasca River, leaving behind hundreds of square kilometres of toxic tailings ponds. It costs about $100,000 to make one flowing barrel. And that’s just to extract the easy stuff that lies near the surface.

Most of the bitumen lies deeply buried where it can only be recovered by such invasive methods as Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD), which involves drilling a honeycomb of wells deep into the earth, continuously injecting super-heated steam (a process which ironically burns enough natural gas daily to heat four million homes) into the earth to melt the deep bitumen, and pumping out the gooey stuff. This process emits shocking amounts of greenhouse gases, uses so much water that it reduces the flow levels of the Athabasca River (one of Canada’s largest watersheds) to dangerous levels, devastates the landscape, produces massive volumes of tailings ponds (such as the one that killed 1606 ducks last year when they landed on its toxic surface) that nobody knows how to clean up, and uses a clean burning form of energy (natural gas) to produce a dirty and difficult one.

So why are we exploiting these tar sands? The short answer is because the days of cheap and easy to drill oil are over.

The complete answer is a lot more complex, but Nikiforuk does an admirable job of explaining the political, economic, and social drivers behind the frenzied multibillion dollar development of the tar sands. He decries Canada’s and Alberta’s lack of a rational plan for the tar sands and the absence of an energy program in general, as well as the loss of Canadian sovereignty to foreign interests. He explains how it came to be that Alberta failed to maintain reasonable royalty fees for oil development in the province, instead essentially giving the stuff away to multi-nationals and leaving no public funds for dealing with the aftermath of the exploitation of the area. He pinpoints the human costs – the astronomical rates of rare bile ducts cancers in downstream Fort Chipewyan, the carnage that is rampant on the major highway into the area which ferries in workers from as far away as Newfoundland, the major problems of drug and alcohol abuse in the work camps. And Nikiforuk explains all too clearly the devastation of the environment.

This is not an easy book to read without becoming incensed. But perhaps a little rage is what we need to come to our senses in order to insist that this difficult and finite resource be used sparingly and wisely, as a transition to a low-carbon economy. It is certainly what I needed to motivate myself to make personal changes to reduce my reliance on petroleum and to demand that my province and my country stop squandering my resources and my future.

Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent is essential reading.