Tar Sands Development

The following companies all currently invest heavily in Tar Sands development. Companies shown in boldface are oil companies with retail arms: Husky, Petro Canada, Shell and Suncor (Sunoco). While it is probable that almost all oil companies share some degree of culpability in the exploitation of the Tar Sands, these companies are actively engaged in large-scale financial support for Tar Sands exploration, expansion and development. Remember that, next time you're filling up your tank...

The Athabasca Tar Sands is currently the world's second-largest reserve of oil. But, it's not really "oil", in the same sense as conventional sources, such as the Saudi oil fields. It's actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on Earth. An area the size of England, comprising pristine forests and marshes, will be dug up.

To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. It requires the equivalent energy of one barrel of oil to wash, process and refine four barrels of tar sands oil; in other words, the EROEI--energy return on energy invested--is 4:1, the lowest of any oil resource on the globe (conventional oil sources have initial EROEI's of around 100:1, which deteriorates to about 20:1 as the oil field matures and enters decline. By the time the EROEI drops to around 6:1, the field is considered to be depleted.)

Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated waste water is held in vast tailings ponds, some so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases. The largest of these tailings ponds are clearly visible from space.

Refining tar sands requires anywhere from three to twenty as much energy as refining conventional crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta's tar sands operation is now the world's biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on Earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.

(Excerpted and slightly edited from a Guardian article by George Monbiot)