One government estimate put the bill as high as U.S. “That would just make things worse,” Deranger says.įor one thing, Deranger points out, the cleanup of mines and tailings ponds will eventually require enormous investment. Even though Indigenous Climate Action is led by former activists from Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and other organizations, they don’t want to shut the oil sands industry down. With the oil industry’s fingers in all aspects of government, communities don’t have much choice, says Deranger. Some have never eaten meat from a store,” she says. “There’s a strong cultural preference for food from the land. The best they can hope for is to have some land set aside to buffer the impacts and get some compensation. “Projects are always approved by government,” Baker says. Karim Zariffa, the executive director of Oil Sands Community Alliance, an industry group, says the industry has tried to work closely with local and indigenous people over decades to share information and provide funding.īut if local communities object to proposed oil sands projects, says Janelle Marie Baker, an anthropologist at Alberta’s Athabasca University, it makes no difference. But north of Fort McMurray the bitumen layer is shallow enough that it can be strip mined in huge open pits. In most of Alberta, the bitumen is buried so deep that wells must be drilled to extract it, and steam injected to mobilize it, at great energy cost. Bitumen is too thick to pump, so light crude oil and chemicals are added. What’s shipped is diluted bitumen, not crude oil. Together, the companies pump out 2.6 million barrels every day, virtually all of which is shipped to U.S. The 120-odd active oil sands projects are owned by major oil companies from Canada and around the world, including the U.S. Instead, a huge area about the size of Florida or Wisconsin north and east of Edmonton, Alberta, contains a tarry bitumen mixed with sand that is mined from underneath the boreal forest. Perhaps surprisingly, the oil sands don’t actually have any oil per se. The vast majority of Canada’s oil is produced in Alberta. lately, thanks to shale fracking, oil is a much bigger part of the Canadian economy. Oil is the country’s biggest export earner, and although production has boomed even more in the U.S. Big footprintĬanada has produced oil since the 1850s. A study published in April in Nature Communications found that emissions from the Canadian oil sands, measured directly from aircraft, are about 30 percent higher than the figures reported by the industry.
Nor is it likely to meet its 2030 Paris climate target-and that's almost entirely due to increasing emissions from the oil and gas sector, which are expected to reach 100 million metric tons a year by then. However, Canada is not likely to meet its 2020 carbon emission reduction target, experts warn. He says the average emissions per barrel of oil produced in the region have declined by roughly 30 percent since the early 1990s.
But the industry is working with the government, he says, “to help put in place climate policies to help meet the goals.” Abel points to carbon-capture technology being developed and deployed by the industry-including a Shell project that captured a million tons of carbon dioxide in its first year in 2016. The growing oil sands sector presents carbon challenges, CAPP executive vice president Terry Abel acknowledges.
The expanded pipeline had been bitterly opposed by indigenous and environmental groups-but is important for unlocking new Pacific markets for the Alberta oil sands. $3.4 billion (C $4.5 billion) to buy the whole project. Yet when Texas-based Kinder Morgan, owners of the 65-year-old Trans Mountain oil pipeline, announced last year that it was abandoning plans to expand the pipeline-essentially by building a much larger twin along most of the same 715-mile (1,150-kilometer) route from Alberta to British Columbia-the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spent U.S. A national carbon tax went into effect April 1, 2019. At the Paris climate summit in 2015, Canada pushed for the ambitious 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) global warming target. $350 million (C $463 million) for energy research. As early as 2007, Alberta’s provincial government instituted a carbon tax on large industrial emitters, which has raised U.S. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Ĭanada does have some claim to credibility on the climate action front.
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