Even if that trend doesn't materialize, there are limits to how "green" the oil sands might get.

That same IHS-CERA report modeled an "aggressive technology scenario" to 2035, one in which governments set a carbon price of at least $100 per ton (compared to Alberta's current $15); and production levels off at 3.1 million barrels per day (about double today's output).

That scenario would see more than half of Alberta's oil upgraders fitted with carbon capture and storage technology. Small nuclear plants begin to replace greenhouse gas-emitting natural gas boilers. Cenovus-type steam innovations and other "revolutionary" technologies become widespread among in situ operators. Mining operations boost their efficiency by 10 per cent.  

All of this combined, in IHS-CERA's scenario, would help reduce the industry's carbon intensity by nearly one-third, an impressive achievement by any standard. 



Clean to make, still dirty to use

Yet oil sands bitumen produced in 2035 would still be 36 per cent worse for the climate than conventional crude oil, the report suggested.  

"There is no doubt we must clean up many aspects of oil sands production," wrote David Keith, an internationally renowned climate expert who teaches at Harvard and the University of Calgary, in a co-authored paper back in 2010. "But that does not mean we should put all our emissions-cutting chips on the oil sands."

Keith's reasoning is simple: no matter how cleanly gasoline, diesel or jet fuel is produced, 60 to 80 per cent of its carbon footprint comes from burning it in a combustion engine.

For all the media attention, political will and public money devoted to the oil sands, he argues, in the absolute best case scenario, a completely carbon-neutral bitumen production industry would reduce the lifetime footprint of the fossil fuels it produced by only 30 per cent.

Such thinking puts Keith at odds with the Alberta and federal governments. Together they have promised more than $1.7 billion for oil sands-related carbon capture and storage technology, among other initiatives to "green" bitumen production.

That approach, Keith charges, "doesn't make much sense." The oil sands are such a specialized, regional sector, he reasons, that any game-changing innovation to make them cleaner would have limited application outside Alberta.

"If you want to decarbonize the transportation sector," Keith told the Tyee Solutions Society in an interview, "squeezing emissions from upstream oil and gas is not going to be very successful. That pathway doesn't lead to significant reductions or transition" to a low-carbon economy.



Tactical targeting

But if bitumen's carbon footprint is unlikely to be easily trimmed or decisive to the climate, why then do environmental groups focus so intensely on it? The answer may lie in the difference between strategy and tactics.

Pretty much all major environmental groups—as well as many oil sands firms -- agree publically or privately that an economy-wide price on greenhouse gas emissions would be the most effective way to fight climate change. But the current political atmosphere in North America makes it hard to advocate for such a sweeping policy.

Instead, environmentalists sustain attention to climate change by focusing the public on visible symbols of our fossil fuel addiction. And few are more potent than northern Alberta's toxic moonscapes, oil drenched ducks, rapidly growing greenhouse gas emissions, and its vulnerable pipelines stretching across America's heartland.

"We've already seen that 'pricing carbon' doesn't exactly get people into the streets," argued David Roberts, staff writer for the progressive U.S. news website Grist.org. "To find the stories/conflicts that get people fired up, activists have to come closer to home."

Little could strike closer to home for much of middle America than TransCanada Corp.'s proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta's oil sands to the Texas Gulf Coast.

Some see no coincidence in the fact that the project, evocatively described as a "fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent" by its critics, exploded into the U.S. news cycle shortly after Congress abandoned cap and trade legislation in mid-2010.

"The reason that Keystone got so much attention is not because that particular pipeline is a make-or-break issue for climate change," President Barack Obama said in a recent Rolling Stone interview, "but because those who have looked at the science of climate change are scared and concerned about a general lack of sufficient movement to deal with the problem."

N-Solv Corp's John Nenniger shares those climate change fears. "Terrifying," is his word for them.

Yet he's an engineer by vocation and temperament, and approaches problems accordingly. When Nenniger looks at the oil sands, he sees a large and growing source of emissions that the right technology could sharply limit.

"As a society," he told Tyee Solutions, "we need two arrows in our quiver."

Modern civilization, he agrees, desperately needs to temper its addiction to fossil fuels to have a fighting chance of stopping global warming. The other arrow, Nenniger insists, "is a cleaner supply of hydrocarbons."

Tomorrow: Stick that carbon back in the ground? The high price and distant hope for carbon sequestration. Find the entire series to date here.