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Steps to an oil sands we can live with. First in a Tyee Solutions Society series.
Suncor's Millenium oil sands mine east of the Athabasca River. Photo: David Dodge, The Pembina Institute.
'The conversation is going downhill when it should be rising to new heights.'
John Nenniger believes he can achieve something many think impossible. He intends to make Alberta's oil sands legitimately "green." He believes it can be done without harming the provincial or Canadian economies. Quite the opposite: oil sands producers, and the country as a whole, could actually get even richer.
"There's this cliché that the environment is tugging in one direction and economics are taking you in another," he observes.
Nenniger, along with many others I spoke to in researching this series, believes instead that the acrimonious "pro-oil" vs. "pro-environment" divide obscures a promising, if under-explored, possibility: that real-world policies and technology could one day reconcile the vast wealth of Alberta's oil sands resource with the survival of its Boreal forests and the stability of the global climate.
The small company Nenniger founded and now leads, N-Solv Corp, claims to be demonstrating that path with technology could virtually eliminate water usage and carbon emissions for new oil sands operations -- and make them twice as profitable.
The oil sands are often portrayed as a single environmental issue. In reality, they represent many. After scores of conversations with men and women like Nenniger over the past four months, I chose to broadly divide the industry's impacts into two categories: the regional and the atmospheric.
The physical footprint that oil sands development has stamped on Northern Alberta is hard to overstate: a mined area larger than the city of Edmonton; enough toxic waste produced each day to fill Toronto's Skydome.
My reporting in the months ahead will explore what's being tried, tested and thought about to reduce the regional physical impacts that have radically transformed an enormous swathe of northern Alberta's wilderness and threaten a watershed one-fifth the size of the entire country.
Yet these daunting challenges demand a different set of policy and technology solutions than another issue of global impact and concern: carbon.
How Canada deals with the soaring emissions of greenhouse gases from bitumen production is in many ways a bellwether of our ability to transition to a sustainable future.
At the same time, those emissions are increasingly being recognized as a major business liability that, if not adequately addressed, could sink the economics of the oil sands for good -- and with them, an important driver of the Canadian economy.
For those reasons, the first series of stories in this year-long Tyee Solutions Society inquiry will deal almost exclusively with carbon.
Threat assessment
My reporting started with the premise that continued oil sands development need not necessarily be incompatible with a low-carbon Canadian economy -- depending on its pace and scale, and what else we do in the meantime.
As it turned out, months of reporting bolstered a provocative counterintuition: that given the right technology and government policies, bitumen production could actually speed up the transition to a climate-friendly economy.
Let me unpack that statement a little bit.
As things stand now, oil sands expansion may be the largest single obstacle to achieving Canada's stated climate-change emission targets, not to mention an international symbol of our planet's damaging addiction to fossil fuels. Yet even under the wildest growth projections, the oil sands will not single-handedly ruin the climate. Coal is a much bigger global culprit.
That fact might be used to argue that there's no point to limiting oil sands development at all. So that's where we'll start, by taking up that devil's argument and asking the taboo question: Should we bother restraining the oilsands?
One thing that pretty much every climate policy reformer wants to see is a market price on the nation's greenhouse emissions. Remarkably unheralded is a widely held consensus within Canada's mainstream business community on precisely the same point. My second installment will reveal how and why some of Alberta's leading, and most-polluting, oil sands companies are open backers of a national carbon tax on their product.
Almost as unknown beyond Alberta's borders is the fact that the province actually enacted North America's first industrial carbon tax, a holy grail for many climate campaigners, way back in 2007. Yet mounting evidence now suggests the levy might actually be stalling climate progress on the prairies. My third report will explain the perverse outcome, and how Alberta might reclaim its policy leadership.
Breakthroughs and big money
But what if a price on carbon isn't enough to trim Canada's emissions? I've taken the skeptic's approach, and assumed we'll also need new technology, and just as important, the money to fund the nascent green energy economy -- the subject I'll look at in part four.
Government of course isn't the only factor in the climate solutions equation. Green energy breakthroughs or large-scale innovations by oil sands operators themselves could someday have a big impact on Alberta's carbon footprint. Precisely how big though, and whether improving the industry is worth the time and money, is the subject of part five of my series.
If the future calls into question the prospects for the oil sands industry, it does the same for the multi-billion dollar support that provincial and federal governments are advancing for capture and storage technology, a risky attempt to reduce bitumen's carbon load -- and its marketplace stigma.
Installment six will discover that there may be big enough promise to warrant those huge subsidies, but not for the reasons most often publicly debated.
I'll conclude with a detailed look at how the oil sands fit into the rest of federal climate policy. Again the results may surprise, as we discover what national policymakers could learn from their Alberta counterparts and the oil sands industry itself.
Beyond deadlock
Researching this series involved extensive interviews with Ivy League academics, industry think tanks, environmental watchdogs, government experts and oil sands majors like Cenovus and Suncor. These interviews were augmented by on the ground reporting from Calgary and Edmonton.
Virtually everyone I met with was tired of the sterile exchange of mutual suspicions among oil sands boosters and bashers. They longed for an informed discussion on real solutions.
As Tyee editor David Beers writes today, that narrative of transition to a sustainable energy future must be built on hard evidence and informed opinion, and my reporting project launched today seeks to be of service in that regard.
These seven stories by no means attempt to define the steps Alberta and Canada need to take to realize a low-carbon future. Rather, I hope they can contribute to starting that much-needed national conversation.
Tomorrow: Why the oil patch will learn to love green: Surprising voices from the hydrocarbon industry. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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Forest_Lover
48 weeks ago
A Revolution in thinking
An article in yesterday Vancouver Sun had an article on the top 10 ways Canada could stop uncontrolled climate change, # 1 was A Revolution in thinking. That revolution would see a movement away from coal and Albertas tar.
Yet, as another item on the list mentioned, Corporate Adgendas actually run our world and country. Until that can be changed and only simple Canadians can do that, we are all in deep shit.
marlonbrando
48 weeks ago
re: A revolution
It's easy to say 'let's change our thinking', but the fact remains that capital investment is focused on petroleum exploration because the return on investment is simply better.
Clean energy is a common goal, but we are years away from it becoming a feasible reality. One only has to look at electric cars and the reality that they produce more of a carbon footprint that they save due to the recharging being powered by fossil fuels; especially coal in the USA.
Luck
48 weeks ago
THE TARS OF ALBERTA OFFERS........................
THE TARS OF ALBERTA OFFERS............,
OFFERS WAY TO MUCH ROOM FOR CORRUPTION,
SOFT CRIMES, GREED AND WHITE COLLAR,
CRIMINAL ACTIVITY, CONFLICT OF INTEREST,
THAT IS ACCEPTED,
IN POLITICAL CIRCLES AS NORMAL,
WE AGREE THAT,
COMMON PEOPLE CAN FIX THE PROBLEM(S) NOT THE ONES WHO CREATED THEM,
AS EINSTEIN QUOTES,
“It is not with the frame of mind that created the problem that can solve it”
98%, EH 98% EH
WE NEED TO WRAP THEIR BRAIN AROUND THIS PROFOUND STATEMENT AND TAKE CONTROL THRU VOTING POWER,
ARE YOU READY
cityzen
48 weeks ago
Missing the point
This sounds like it will be an interesting, well-researched series. I look forward to reading it.
Yet I still feel its missing the point. Fossil fuels must be left in the ground, starting yesterday - there really is no other valid argument. We currently don't have any way to use them without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Life on Earth is currently in peril from ever-rising CO2 and methane emissions, human civilization likely to be wiped out within the next 50 years or so, the next Great Extinction already starting. Only radical change in human activity on a global scale over the next few decades will provide any hope for a future. We really only have 2 or 3 years now to prevent significant irreversible impacts. Allowing pro-Oil governments to stand now is gravely irresponsible.
The techo- and economic fixes being suggested, trying to maintain a fossil-fuel-based civilization and the associated profits, are academically interesting but basically irrelevant. The powers that be need to be turfed and replaced with those willing to enact necessary changes; renewable energy is the only allowable option (barring a sudden discovery of energy from fusion); meat has to be taken off the menu for the most part; whole populations need to be relocated for parts of the Earth to recover from our destructive impact and the global population needs to decrease significantly if we want to survive with the finite resources of one planet. I'd like to read more about how all that's going to happen. But if we can't use our big brains to foresee and prevent the danger we currently face, and only react once the serious impacts have started (which will be too late), then humanity should go the way of the dinosaurs. I, for one, appreciate the uniqueness of life on Earth in our vast empty universe, and think conserving that diversity of living things at any cost is the only moral thing to do.
searching
48 weeks ago
looking forward to the series
Great to see this series coming up. Sounds like a valuable contribution to a national conversation that is so in need of non-polarizing views. We need to find a way to move from our entrenched views of pro-economy or pro-environment to sustainable development and this series sounds like it can contribute to that. Thanks so much.
freewilly
48 weeks ago
no plan
I remember when the tar sands were just a dream, a lark, noone at the time beleived gas would rise in cost to the extent it has, (Well most people) But the market economy didnt seem as dominant as it is now. Governments could have long term goals to attain new energy sources. This economy only prolongs our dependence on fossil fuels, it even promotes these products by pushing up the price of gas and oil.
fusion could be a reality, if more doe were put towards this goal it would happen. Do economists and thinkers understand what would happen if energy production took a sudden left turn. Who would be the winners and losers? Maybe we should be 'planning' for change...
cyberclark
48 weeks ago
Alberta Resources the biggest resorce rip off in History!
Alberta collects zilch for Royalty. The conservatives will glibly tell the public it is Alberta's resource yet, don't collect one cent for it.
Beyond this, we pay for the roads, water and the power lines built into them to export their power.
Not only are we loosing our resource revenue to foreign companies we are paying them to take it!
Certainly it makes the tills ching around the country when some widget needs to be purchased but the billions of revenues we are entitled to go to the companies.
As the heading says, this is be biggest resource rip off in the history of the America's if not the world.
Luck
48 weeks ago
GREEN CANADA AND .....................
GREEN CANADA AND .........
ALL THE RIGHT BUZZ WORDS,
PROMISES, SNAKE OIL, MONEY LAUNDERS,PASSING THE BUCK, IGNORING FACTS, NOT COLLECTING FED REVENUES,
DO CANADIANS REALLY KNOW WHATS HAPPENING IN ALBERTA TAR SANDS,
KNOWN TO MANY OTHER COUNTRIES AS THE ASS HOLE OF THE WORLD,
IT IS FOREIGN MONEY, SO IT IS FOREIGN OWNED,
IF YOU WANTS A FANCY COLORFUL STORY,
THAT HAS SEQUELS,
THEN WE SUGGEST WATCHING HOMER SIMPSON AND THOSE OTHER ADULT COMEDIES,
YOU'LL ENJOY IT A HELL OF A LOT MORE,
AND THE ONLY RIP OFF IS YOUR TIME,
THEN GET OUT AND VOTE TO PATCH AND CLEAN UP UP THE A.T.S ALIAS A.H. OF THE WORLD,
OUR GOVS FRIENDS CREATED
bhglennie
48 weeks ago
new technology
the governments in Canada should be collecting royalties, like every other third world country does, and using some of these moneys to help develop safer technologies.
But Harper Conservatives are closing down research facilities and environmental guidelines instead of keeping Canada in the forefront.
We should be doing this for all mining, oil and minerals and change the sleasy image Canadian companies are getting world wide.
IF ITS WORTH DOING, ITS WORTH DOING RIGHT. This series of articles is the kind of research that we need.
anne cameron
48 weeks ago
"there really is no other valid argument"...
Statements like that make me deeply uneasy. Of course there are other valid points of view. If you start off by insisting yours is the only valid opinion you've already lost the discussion, your mind is a closed book.
We've lost our sense of the sacred, we've lost our spiritual understanding, we've been brain-washed to believe things which do not stand any reasonable or logical examination and we've been conditioned to accept what is, really, a pack of lies.
We don't "need" so many airline companies sending so many planes on high that they have to twist and contort themselves with hidden charges and added taxes in order to stay aloft, and we don't all need to take pounds of luggage with us when we hop a plane and go spend four days visiting some relative who happens to live across the nation. We don't have to drive to the other side of the country to buy a car and drive it back again because we think we have "saved" whatever sum in taxes.
There's a whole-bunch stuff we don't "need" but seem to believe we have to have. You can't create "wealth", you can only take it from one place and move it to another and right now we're taking it from our grandchildren and putting it in the pockets of those who already have far too much of it.
G West
48 weeks ago
Could Alberta's 'Tar' Pave the Road to a Green Canada?
NO. It's a simplistic question - but it has a very simple answer.
rogerlg
48 weeks ago
carbon pricing
I learned something about the breadth of corporate support for a national price on carbon last year, when I wrote to 186 Canadian companies asking their opinion. I received 45 answers back, a modest success. Almost all were either accepting a carbon tax as the best option, or simply saying "We're watching, and we're ready for whatever happens."
I'm changing gears this year, aiming to build grassroots awareness and support for a national price on carbon in Canada, and I've got a few ideas about that. Anyone want to help out?
edwardian
48 weeks ago
greenwashing
any green plan would be a step in the right direction. any arguments i see are all about money. what about people what about natural habitat? what about life on this planet? what seems feasible at the cost of extraction, is prohibitive at the cost of bringing back the soil to a usable healthy state, not to mention all the communities and permaculture it is destroying. yes, anything but greenwashing. the stupidest thing i have seen is a propaganda film at the movie theaters that represents this devastation as a small refinery in a greenbelt that is good for canada because it will provide a few jobs. what a bloody hypocrisy.
edwardian
48 weeks ago
greening vs greenwashing
two out, bases loaded, go for it!
H.G
48 weeks ago
Greening the oil sands
Unfortunately Canada has become a petro state instead of a producer of goods which will not stand us in good stead in the future. All the talk about carbon credits is in my view the biggest conn game ever, and while China is openning 3 coal fired generater stations a week we also don't need to worry about carbon pollution.
I look forward to reading these articles, but am concerned that the auther does not seem to have a section on the direct pollution deposits created at the site and the affects that they will have on our wild life, natural gas reserves, water aquifers not to mention human life.
I believe that the Tar Sands project has been ill conceived from the get go. Nuclear fission and fusion should be the future. Those tailing ponds scare the hell out of me and will probably become the biggest cess pool in the world or at least a close second to something in China.