The production of oil by mining the tar sands of northern Alberta makes a hell of a lot of money for the province—and to some degree, the country as a whole—but this boom comes at a heavy, heavy price to society, the economy, and the environment.
VBS.tv produced a great documentary, ‘Toxic Alberta’, that shows the flip side of the Alberta economic miracle, which you can view online on their site for free.
Thousands of men, mostly from the Maritimes, moved out West, promised incredibly high-paying jobs, but arrive in Fort McMurray and places like it with no place to live. It’s literally like a modern-day Wild West with grizzled prospectors living in squalid trailer park cities, sometimes earning lots of money but then squandering it on drugs, gambling, alcohol and other vices, getting into fights, and becoming victims of crime and gang activity. The region is experiencing growth at a rate of 9% a year, and ordinary cities struggle at only 2-3% growth, so this is not sustainable, it’s spiralling out of control.
First Nations peoples have essentially been surrounded by oilfield production, which has polluted the region so much that their traditional lifestyle is now impossible—fish and game are completely toxic, and the caribou have basically been driven out of the region. An epidemic of cancers and other diseases exists, but no-one talks about it. Some try to make a go of it, but many end up homeless, living outdoors in subarctic temperatures—even the elderly.
Even workers aren’t immune. With a severe housing crisis, some developers have turned to building dormitory-style buildings with subsidized rents—the cost of a one-bedroom apartment in Fort McMurray can be as high as $1800 a month, and anyone making $70k or less basically needs public assistance – the infrastructure of the region was not set up to handle this boom.
The process of extraction is turning an area the size of Florida into a moonscape. Entire forests are knocked down, bulldozed, and the sands below them dug up with trucks the size of houses. The Athabasca River is drained for water to boil out the tar (at a rate of 4-5 barrels of water per barrel of oil), and the toxic residue is then dumped into tailings ponds the size of entire suburbs; the river is also polluted by other outflow. Downstream users of river water are now struggling to find fresh water for agriculture, municipal uses, etc. If all the oil could be extracted, it would pollute an amount of water equivalent to TEN Lake Superiors. I don’t think we have that much water to spare.
The extraction process also releases an enormous amount of greenhouse gases. Natural gas is burned to refine the raw bitumen into crude, releasing 27 million tonnes of C02 into the atmosphere – roughly responsible for a staggering 40% of all Canadian industrial emissions and on track, with a projected fivefold expansion by 2020, to over 120 million tonnes. This, without even taking into account the greenhouse gases that will be released by the eventual burning of the oil itself.
With all of that, the strip-mining of bitumen represents a kind of desperation as the world’s fossil fuel energy supply reaches its peak of production (Peak Oil) and starts going into decline as we use up what has been discovered. Alberta’s tar sands are energy-intensive to recover, and furthermore, are a kind of heavy, sour (sulfurous) crude, compared to the easy-to-extract ‘gushers,’ the sweet light crude of the 20th century oil boom. It has been described as ‘literally scraping the bottom of the barrel’ to get what’s left.
At current rates of use, it will only sustain North America for another 50 years, anyway—and China’s already staked claims to some of it, through its purchases of plants there. If we continue using it the way we’re using it, severe climate change is inevitable and we’re only setting ourselves up for a worse fall – both economic and environmental- when energy supplies inevitably decline. The consequences for the province of Alberta will be catastrophic if they do not move to transition to sustainable industries.
Ironically, Alberta is one of the best-sited regions for wind and solar production in Canada. Like several of the American states nearby, the region has the potential to become a ‘Saudia Arabia of wind power’ if it so chose.
I’m realistic: there’s too much money to be made in the tar sands for it to just close up shop tomorrow. But unless something is done, a beautiful province will become despoiled and poisoned; and our economy will be distorted by the idea that we can keep on living an unsustainable, fossil fuel lifestyle.
I believe the governments (federal and provincial) have to take immediate action to start ramping down tar sands production (or at least cap it at sustainable levels), and ramp up sustainable energy production. This could be done by a series of market mechanisms, cap-and-trade systems, and incentives to invest in renewable rather than fossil energy production. As citizens of Canada, the US and the World, this affects EVERYONE, and everyone should urge Alberta to do the right thing – not just for moral reasons, but for reasons of logic, science, health, and to create a stable economy that isn’t distorted by a single commodity.