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Alberta Tar Sands Fact Sheet

Definition:

Alberta’s Tar Sands (also known as Oil Sands) are found primarily in northeast Alberta, Canada. Altogether the sands occupy 140,000 square kilometers, a land mass a) three times the size of Switzerland; b) the size of Florida.

The sands are a mixture of sand/clay, water, and a very heavy, viscous, tar-like substance called bitumen. Bitumen is extracted from the sand through processes that are extremely water and energy intensive.

The bitumen can be removed from the sand one of two ways. If the sands are close to the surface of the earth then strip mining is used. Basically, the top layer of the landscape is removed in order to dig up the sands underneath. “Great machines mow down trees (and all their supporting creatures such as boreal songbirds and woodland caribou), roll up acres of muskeg, drain entire wetlands, and reroute rivers” (http://www.onearth.org/article/canadas-highway-to-hell). Then enormous shovels dig and transfer the sand into massive trucks which bring it to cleaning facilities.

However, 82% of the tar sands are too deep to strip mine. In these cases industries use a technique they call in situ mining. In Situ is latin for ‘in place’. The bitumen is heated up while it’s still underground by steam drills so wells can be dug and it can be extracted in a manner more closely resembling the techniques used for conventional oil.

Overall, ‘oil sand producers move enough overburden [layers of sand, gravel, and shale which covered oil sands before mining began] and shallow oil sands every two days to fill Yankee Stadium’ (http://www.energy.alberta.ca/OilSands/790.asp).

There is an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of crude bitumen in the sands. If this figure in fact represents a viable oil reserve, Canada comes in second only to Saudi Arabia as the country with the most oil. In fact, Canada is the only place worldwide with large scale oil sand development (oil sands in Utah and Venezuela have not been developed due to political setbacks). Production of bitumen-derived oil comprises 40% of Canada’s oil output now; this figure is expected to increase very quickly.

History:

Natives first used tar sands to fix their canoes by warming the asphalt-like substance then applying it as a patch. However commercial development of tar sands through strip mining didn’t begin until the 1960’s near Fort McMurray. Such development grew minimally through the ‘90’s. It was, and is, universally recognized that the tar sands are one of the dirtiest forms of oil so large scale development was never deemed economically viable until recently. Then, under increasing pressure to develop oil, the National Oil Sands Task Force, a partnership between Canadian government and oil industries, developed a 25 year plan to mine the sands. Part of this effort included ‘re-branding’ the tar sands as oil sands to eliminate negative connotation. “Production
of oil from Alberta’s tar sands has doubled over the last 10 years to approximately 1.1 million barrels per day in 2005.” (http://www.nrdc.org/energy/drivingithome/drivingithome.pdf). This output is expected to reach 3 million barrels per day by 2015. (http://news.gc.ca/web/view/en/index.jsp?articleid=306539)

Subsequently, Fort McMurray’s population has grown from 36,000 to 64,000 in ten years. The overall cost of living is the highest in Canada and the population spike is often cited as the cause of drastic increases in housing prices and crime. The market has been flooded by the 30,000 workers mining bitumen, and infrastructure hasn’t had the chance to catch up. Long term residents describe the difference of the landscape now vs. then as staggering. One example of the change is that since mining the tar sands is very water intensive, river and lake levels have decreased noticeably. Moreover, highly toxic tailings ponds – manmade ponds where post-mined sand and refuse water is deposited – are located on migratory bird paths and have already killed 500 geese who landed there (http://www.sierraclub.ca/prairie/tarnation.htm). The health implications of living downstream from the Tar Sand Mine residue doesn’t bode well for humans either - “residents of Fort Chipewyan, a community of about 1,200 people 300 kilometers downstream of Fort McMurray, have been diagnosed with a high number of illnesses, including leukemia, lymphomas, lupus, and autoimmune diseases” (http://www.nrdc.org/energy/drivingithome/drivingithome.pdf).

Today, $125 billion in U.S. dollars is committed to developing the sands in the next decade through multi-national oil industries. Additionally, U.S. reliance on Albertan oil is fairly outstanding; amounting to about 16% of our total oil consumption. However, the 2007 Energy Bill contains a highly contested section stating that the U.S. may not use any oil derived from a ‘non-conventional petroleum source’. The provision was initially written because the U.S. Air Force was intending on using coal-to-liquid fuel for its fleet. However, oil derived from tar sands also falls indisputably into the category of ‘non-conventional petroleum’. This restriction against U.S. ‘non conventional’ oil purchases, which will arguably disproportionately affect Canada, raises questions about whether these circumstances violate WTO guidelines. For more information: http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=58310
http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page38?oid=50551&sn=Detail

Ownership:

Alberta owns the tar sands; industry purchases mineral rights to own bitumen. Industries that are currently mining and developing bitumen include Suncor Energy Inc., Syncrude Canada Ltd., Albian Sands Energy Inc, and several others (for a complete list of these companies as well as others which have proposed projects, see http://www.oilsandsdiscovery.com/oil_sands_story/pdfs/projects.pdf).

Energy Usage:

The open-pit mining process – otherwise known as strip mining – accounts for 18% of tar sand development. Strip mining employs large hydraulic and electric powered shovels to transfer oil sands into trucks, each of which weighs 400 tons and stands one and a half stories tall. The wheels alone are 14 feet wide.

The bitumen composition in the sands accounts for only 10-12%, and a mere 75% of this is recoverable through processing. Once the sand is transferred to a facility it’s washed with hot water to isolate the bitumen. It takes two tons of sand to produce one barrel of oil.

Natural gas fuels the bitumen extraction process. The amount of natural gas needed per barrel depends on whether the bitumen has been extracted via strip or in situ mining. In strip mining each barrel of oil requires 250 cubic feet of natural gas. The remaining 82% of the time 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas is needed per barrel of bitumen steamed up from the ground. “Altogether, the tar sands industry consumes enough natural gas every day to heat roughly 4 million American homes.” (http://www.nrdc.org/energy/drivingithome/drivingithome.pdf)

Plans for a Mackenzie Natural Gas Pipeline, running 758 miles from the Mackenzie Valley in Northwest Canada, are in the works. Nuclear energy has also been proposed as a way to fuel the tar sand development. The Canadian government recently estimated it might take 20 nuclear reactors to replace natural gas as the fuel source by 2015 (http://www.onearth.org/article/canadas-highway-to-hell?page=2).

Producing oil from tar sands creates three times more carbon emissions per barrel than the process of extracting traditional oil.

Water Usage:

During strip mining each barrel of bitumen extracted from the sands requires 2-5 barrels of water. In situ mining uses 2 ½ - 4 barrels of water per barrel of bitumen.

“About 90 percent of the water withdrawn from the Athabasca River for mining ends up behind massive tailings dams or dykes. Covering an area of 30 square miles, nearly a dozen man-made impoundments line both sides of the Athabasca; the largest of them covers more than 7,400 acres.

“Every year the tar-sands operations withdraw 250,000 Olympic-size pools of water from the Athabasca [River]. That's enough water to service a city of two million people.” (http://www.onearth.org/article/canadas-highway-to-hell?page=3).

“As the Alberta government continues to approve all proposed tar sands projects (no proposal to date has ever been rejected), Alberta is looking at having tar sands tailings lakes which combined will cover an area greater than five Sylvan Lakes (a lake the size 42.8 square kilometers)” (http://www.sierraclub.ca/prairie/tarnation.htm).

Net Carbon Emissions:

“In 2000, the tar sands industry released 23.3 MT of GHG emissions (3 per cent of Canada's total). By 2015, tar sands GHG emissions are expected to rise to between 57 and 97 MT--which would make it the single largest contributor to GHG emissions growth in Canada. This would also virtually guarantee that Canada would fail to achieve its Kyoto Protocol targets” (http://www.sierraclub.ca/prairie/tarnation.htm).

(Potential) Relationship to Alaska:

TransCanada, whose proposal for the Natural Gas Pipeline in Alaska is supported by Governor Palin, has already constructed all of the major pipelines tied into the Tar Sands. The Mackenzie Gas Project, which is the natural gas pipeline slated to run from Northwest Territories in Canada directly to the Tar Sand region of Alberta, is a TransCanada project. The Keystone oil pipeline (currently under construction), which is also TransCanada, is what will bring both Tar Sand-derived oil and natural gas to Midwest Markets. Given the planned pipelines and the projected energy needs of the Tar Sands, the potential connection between Alaska’s natural gas and Alberta’s Tar Sands is significant.