You might not have heard about Canada's Oil Sands before but this massive energy project
is causing a lot of concern in environmental circles.
One organisation has even labelled it the most destructive project on Earth.
So what exactly is it?
Oil Sand or Tar Sand depending on who you speak to is a naturally occurring mixture
of sand, clay, or other minerals, water and most importantly bitumen.
This is what a grain of the mixture looks like.
Bitumen which is found on the outside of the grain is an extremely thick and sticky oil
which must be treated before it can be used by refinery's to produce usable fuels like
gasoline, or petrol if you live in the UK, and diesel.
This sand mixture can be found in several locations around the globe including Venezuela,
the United States and Russia but it's Canada's deposits of the stuff that has really got
people talking.
Even the name of Canada's deposits is controversial.
While environmentalists prefer to refer to them as Tar Sands, the Canadian government
has officially named the deposits Oil Sands and says the sand mixture doesn't actually
contain any tar.
It's popularly believe that Tar Sands are much dirtier and threatening than oil and
who uses which term has become a massive source of debate.
To keep things easy we'll refer to the deposits by their official name but let's get back
on track.
Located below 140,200 square kilometers of land in the country's Alberta province Canada's
oil sands is the third largest proven crude oil reserve in the world behind Saudi Arabia
and Venezuela.
In 2011 it was believe the reserve amounted to 170.2 billion barrels of oil or about 11%
of the world's total global oil reserves.
In other words, a lot of oil.
In 2012 production at the oil sands reserve was averaging 1.9 million barrels of oil a
day with the Alberta government saying it expects this to increase to 3 million barrels
per day by 2018 in order to "keep pace with demand".
And this expansion is being financed by $19 billion a year in investments.
Only 20% of the oil sands deposits lie near to the service where they can be easily mined
and this is around the Athabasca River.
The rest of the deposits are buried more than 75 meters below ground.
These images from NASA's land satellite shows the growth of the surface mines around the
Athabasca River between 1984 and 2011.
Much of the demand for Canadian oil is coming from the US, the world's largest consumer
of oil.
Canada is the biggest supplier of oil to the US and in August 2013 they were sending their
neighbour an average 2.6 million barrels of the stuff every single day.
The Alberta based company TransCanada Corp. even wants to build a pipeline linking the
oil sands to refineries on the US's Gulf Coast.
The keystone excel pipeline would transport 800,000 barrels of oil per day across a distance
of 1,179 miles.
And the development of Canada's oil sands is concerning environmentalists for several
reasons.
For starters, producing oil from oil sand or tar sand releases three times the volume
of green gases as producing conventional oil.
Everyday 600 million cubic feet of natural gas, a greenhouse gas omitting fossil fuel,
is used to produce oil from the oil sands.
According to the Pembina Institute, a non-profit environmental organisation, that's enough
gas to heat more than 3 million Canadian homes, and if all the oil in the oil sands reserve
was extracted the former NASA climate scientist Professor James Hansen believes it would be
game over for the climate, but that's not all.
The extraction of oil from the oil sands has also led to huge swats of forest being destroyed
and then there's the contaminated water that's a by-product of the process used to turn the
Bitumen into usable fuel.
This water contains leftover Bitumen as well as solvents used to separate Bitumen from
the sand mixture and is known as tailings.
Energy companies store tailings in open man-made lakes known as tailing ponds.
At present there are more than 170 square kilometers of tailing ponds in the Alberta
province which are considered to be the largest human made structure in the world.
In fact the ponds are so large that they can be seen from space.
According to the Canadian association of petroleum producers, these ponds present a number of
what they call challenges.
This includes the fact that seepage from the ground water can occur as well as the fact
that the water contains chemicals that are toxic to fish and that residual oil can float
to the surface of ponds and pose a risk to water fowl.
In 2010 the energy company Syncrude was fined $3 million Canadian dollars after a flock
of 1,606 birds died after landing on its tailings ponds back in 2008.
And according to a 2008 report by the non-profit social movement organisation, the Pilaris
Institute, there had been an unusually high rate of illnesses amongst the tiny community
of Fort Chipewyan located on the Athabasca lake into which the Athabasca River flows.
This included unusual rates of a bile duct cancer that is very rare and the community
believes the source of their sickness is the water and in October 2013 communities bordering
the Athabasca River were warned not to drink from the waterway after a breach in a tailing
storage pond dumped one billion liters of contaminated water.
If development of the oil sands reserve continues to expand at current rates, then according
to the Pembina Institute by 2022 so much fuel will be being produced that just a months
output of this contaminated waste water could turn an area the size of New York's Central
Park into a toxic reservoir 11 feet deep.
But despite the ongoing expansion of development of oil sands there are signs that the tide
is beginning to turn against the project.
A European Union intention to designate oil from sands as 25% more polluting than the
conventional oil would effectively seek imports of oil from the oil sands banned.
Naturally the Canadian government isn't all that happy about this however and has even
threatened a trade war with the EU over the proposal.
Only time will well who will win out but in the meantime we'd love to hear your thoughts
on this so leave a comment and we'll see you again next time.