Not trying to be an apologist or anything, but could we clarify what these claims mean? There is a lot of imprecise alarmist language being used that prevents anyone from forming an accurate picture of how big the mess actually is.
So, in one year, the oil sands operation uses twice as much water as the city of Calgary does in the same period? Or the total amount licensed over however many years is equivalent to one year’s consumption by a fairly small city? Or what? Why do we need to mention the amount per year? Why not just say ‘during the same period of time’, or ‘per day’? That would be far more clear and would avoid scaremongering by purposely introducing large numbers.
And why is this important? Wikipedia has it that 15% of all water usage worldwide is for industrial purposes. Water is used by most oil recovery/refining processes. Is this industry more or less demanding than others producing the same amount of usable oil? Is there anything especially bad about this site or is the issue simply that it happens to be in the author’s back yard?
Calgary has a population of a little over 1,000,000 - about 3% of Canada’s population. How much oil does the city use? Oil companies don’t dig the stuff up for fun, you know. They respond to demand from consumers. Why don’t the people of Calgary abandon their big cars and live in igloos if they don’t like people extracting oil to power their destructive lifestyles?
Enough to heat 3 million homes for the same day? Or enough to heat them for the afore-mentioned year? Is this figure for summer or winter? Why not average it out for a whole year. as we’re talking years-worths of water use? Again, why is the time period important if there is equivalency? There’s an implication here that extracting oil uses a lot of gas in comparison to our thrifty habits when it comes to home heating. How much gas is consumed daily by three million homes in Canada? How much per home? How much oil is burned by the average Canadian per day? And where does that oil come from?
Considered by whom? What list are they quoting from? And “one of” doesn’t really mean anything. Of the ten largest bodies of water created by means of a dam, the biggest is Lake Volta at 8,502 square km and the smallest is Lake Guri, 4250 square kilometres. At 170 to 85 times the size of your ponds they are a hell of a lot bigger and I wonder how long the list would have to be before it included something of only fifty square kilometres. Taipei City, itself a human-made structure visible from space, is 271 square kilometres. Your list would have to be huge.
And ‘can be seen from space’? WTF? Haven’t you heard of Google Earth? Individual people are visible from space, and the phrase is only meaningful when linked to ‘with the naked eye’. Is a comparatively small body of water visible from 300km away? Has any astronaut ever said “Wow! I can see the toxic ponds from up here”? If not then your claim is simple propaganda.
Are you talking about producing raw crude oil? I assume so. So what greenhouse gases are produced in drilling a hole underground? It wouldn’t be hard to prove that the Alberta fields require the burning of more fuel than a good old-fashioned ‘conventional’ well that relies on pressure from below. How would they compare to the oilfields that rely on pressure from above which is produced by burning oil or gas? Can we see some figures for different types of method?
And how do these emissions stack up against the greenhouse gases produced during transportation, refining, and combustion by the good people of Canada in their SUVs? Are the emissions produced during extraction meaningful compared to what happens later? It is possible, for instance, that the oil produced requires less refining, or doesn’t have to be transported as far as say Saudi oil, thus resulting in a net decrease in emissions. If this isn’t the case, then why are we relying on unspecific statements about just one step in the process? Why not provide a clear unambiguous statement about what goes on?
Fastest-growing? You mean like babies grow faster than adults? Is this claim an absolute number or simply a percentage? Twenty percent a year of almost nothing is still not a lot. Ten billion tons more is a lot. How big a source is it now, compared to the City of Calgary or those three million homes? If we’re going to compare water and gas usage on a like-for-like basis then we should compare emissions and growth rates too.
By ‘source’ do you mean the emissions produced by the extraction process? Or do you include all the greenhouse gases produced by all those people burning the oil after it has been extracted? If they didn’t get that oil from Alberta then where would it come from? Would Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions become magically lower by some massive amount if the oil were to be transported from Iraq or Alaska?
But… you said that the extraction required the burning of an awful lot of natural gas: equivalent to 3,000,000 homes.
Burning natural gas produces less CO2 than would be required to generate the same amount of heat than you would get from burning oil. My home in the UK used oil-fired heating, and used a lot less of the stuff than I used in my car over the same period. It seems to me that enough gas to heat 3,000,000 homes is going to produce an awful lot less CO2 than enough oil to power all the trucks and cars on the road.
Canada’s oil consumption in 2006 is listedat 2,218,000 barrels/day. The output of Athabasca is listed as 1,126,000 barrels/per day for the same year, and forecast to rise to 3,000,000 barrels/day by 2020.
Even if you multiply your natural gas usage by three by three, you’re still not going to get twice the emissions currently produced by Canadian motorists.
I can see that if you burnt all the oil produced you would get more greenhouse gases than is produced by all the cars and trucks in Canada. But as the people actually doing the burning are going to be doing it in the engines of their cars and trucks it’s hard to see that the simple act of producing oil in Canada instead of elsewhere will result in greater emissions. The cars and trucks will still burn oil.
These ‘facts’ don’t stand up. I get really pissed off with well-meaning alarmists producing arguments that undermine their own credibility. Oil dependency and the accompanying environmental destruction are real problems, but a lot of people still refuse to acknowledge them. Arguing emotively and inaccurately only makes it harder to convince them of the truth, because the truth is hidden. A little more realism on all sides would help a lot.
