Mordor? No, Athabasca

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Posted October 29, 2007 with 394 reads

Keywords: alberta, alternative energy, canada, climate, energy, global warming, Hydro Power, mining, oil, synthetic oil

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In case your Halloween is too happy / not horrible enough, Monkeyfister relays¹ a story in The Guardian² about “land rape on a gigantic scale.” In ten years, according to the article, the mining in the province of Alberta “will encompass an area as large as Florida… All that spoiled land, ruined fresh water, and wasted Natural Gas. It’s terribly ruinous, hopelessly futile, and just plain damned sad.”

Mining this way is hard, boring, ugly work. A heavy-hauler can do up to 63 trips a day, trundling past mountains of pure yellow sulphur (a byproduct of oil purification once it has been extracted from the sand) 80 feet high. In winter there can be so much steam that bulldozer drivers have to inch around, hoping not to topple into tarry pits; in summer there’s so much dust it has to be sprayed down. Workers get three 20-minute coffee-breaks in a 12-hour shift, which can, as in the case of Shell’s Albian Sands, be bookended by two 90-minute commutes from Fort McMurray. Workers arrive in flotillas of buses and sometimes, in the case of the heavy-haulers, that can be the only time they see anyone else all day.

The extraction of the oil requires heat, and thus the burning of vast amounts of natural gas - effectively one barrel of gas to extract two of crude - and some estimate that Fort McMurray and the Athabasca oil sands will soon be Canada’s biggest contributor to global warming; nearly as much as the whole of Denmark. This in an area that has already seen, according to David Schindler, professor of ecology at the University of Alberta, two degrees of warming in the past 40 years.

The oil sands excavations are changing the surface of the planet. The black mines can now be seen from space. In 10 years, estimates Schindler, they are “going to look like one huge open pit” the size of Florida. Acid rain is already killing trees and damaging foliage. The oil companies counter that they are replanting - grass for bison, 4.5m trees by Syncrude alone - but the muskeg (1,000-year-old peat bog and wooded fen, which traps snow melt and prevents flash floods, and is home to endangered woodland caribou) is irreplaceable.

Two barrels of water are required to extract one barrel of oil; every day as much water is taken from the Athabasca river as would serve a city of a million people. Although the water is extensively recycled, it cannot be returned to the rivers, so it ends up in man-made “tailings ponds” (tailings is a catch-all term for the byproducts of mining), which are also visible from space. According to the US Department of the Interior, the dam holding back Syncrude’s pond is the largest, by volume of construction material, in the world. Four of the projects haven’t started production yet, so their tailings ponds haven’t begun, but theirs, too, will soon be full of sand and what Schindler calls “dead water” because, he says, they’re full of carcinogenic hydrocarbons and toxic trace metals such as mercury, cadmium and arsenic, all topped off, in Syncrude’s case, with an oil slick.