Tar sands and feathers for BP’s Alberta project Wed 19-Dec-2007
Posted by xgeorgio in Environment, ReliefWeb.Tags: Alberta, BP, Canada, Exxon-Mobil, oil, oil spill, Shell, tar sands
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In BP’s website, there is a special section for Environment and Society. It is part of the company’s recent efforts to re-shape its market view towards the consumers, after a few blows on its image. Who can forget the 270,000 gallons oil spill in the wild tundra of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska last March. But it seems that it’s just that: a marketing scheme.
In August, Greenpeace reported that BP is preparing for enormous sand oil excavations in Alberta, Canada. It seems that the project is well under way and the company has given Canada a free ticket to the group of non-compliant countries to the Kioto agreement. Terry Macalister of Guardian Unlimited recently reported that Greenpeace threatens BP over Canada for the “greatest climate crime” ever. For each barrel of oil, nearly 4 tons of sand oil have to he excavated and processed via a energy- and water-intensive process. The water itself gets so contaminated that cannot be used or dumped, so it has to be kept in “tailings ponds” that cover up to 20 square miles. At the same time, the wild forests of Canada, one of the world’s greatest CO2 sinkers, are being leveled and thousands of wild species are forced away.
It is estimated that by the year 2012, the UK company will have produced more than 100 million tons of CO2, that is 1/5 of the total emissions of UK itself. Mike Hudema, the climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace in Canada, told The Independent that “…It takes about 29kg of CO2 to produce a barrel of oil conventionally. That figure can be as much 125kg for tar sands oil. It also has the potential to kill off or damage the vast forest wilderness, greater than the size of England and Wales…”.
Guess who other is on the same train with BP on this one: Shell and Exxon-Mobil. No matter how hard we try, some people still don’t get it. It’s like they live in another planet and use this one only for junk.
OK then, fine. Show some leadership. Put your money where your poison pen is. Sell your car. Don’t use the bus or the train. Turn off the lights, the cooker and the heating in your house. Walk to work and the shops. And die aged 36. Make choices. The rest of us have.
If you’re referring to me personally, I indeed try to make whatever I can to make things better or at least don’t make them much worse. I use the metro to get to my work every morning instead of spending 1+ hour in the traffic jam. The lights in my house are fluorescent, I have my office in the best-lighted room so that I can have them off most of the day and I recently changed my old 350W crt monitor with a new 80W flat monitor. When I can, I walk instead of taking the metro or a bus. I use a microwave oven to heat up a cup of water for my coffee because it only takes 2 minutes in 800W instead of 10 minutes of butane flame in a coffee-pot.
I would like to have make more things, like a truly energy-efficient house with 50% natural light and solar panels on the roof, but I can’t. I don’t think it matters though, because it’s not the absolute amount of energy you can save, it’s the little things you do in your everyday life that change the way you see the problem itself. Oil price has just gone up to more than $110 a barrel and current heavyweight oil repositories are gonna get dry within the next 30-50 years. Even if you don’t care about pollution or the environment or any of this “crap”, unless you are willing to have your children and your grandchildren pay $1000 a barrel for oil from Antarctica someday, these small everyday things I mention are gonna have to be mandatory very soon.
Oil energy is not abundant nor cheap nor free of consequences. The sooner we realize that, the easier it would be to make the shift to more efficient technologies and more sensible practices.