According to the official line, the “Canadian
Oil Sands” is some kind of sacred cow of economic prosperity. By “official line”,
of course, I mean propaganda, which in this case uses the word prosperity with
an almost smug tone to an excessive degree. Prosperity has many criteria, however,
and the official version may not stand up to scrutiny, when put to the test.
But of course scrutiny is not the job of propaganda. That job is up to us,
including, but not limited to the likes of Neil Young.
Kudos to Neil!
In my last post here I applauded the stand
taken by Montreal
indie musicians, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, for their direct and unequivocal
statement about corporate interests in the arts and climate change in general.
Now, Mr. Young is making an even bigger scene, with the courage one would wish
leaders in other arenas might one day display. An entire book could be written
on the question as to why it falls on artists to be among the most prominently
vocal dissenters, but more important is the question as to why there are so few
artists, and so few people in general – especially of the boomer generation to
which Neil Young belongs – objecting and otherwise protesting the development
of the Athabasca Tar Sands. I have tried in my own way to be one of those
artists, and I encourage you, dear reader, artist or not, to do the same in
your daily life.
For starters, let’s cut the crap about “oil
sands”. Oil, it is not – and I will elaborate on this point momentarily. A more
accurate, albeit less palatable term is “tar sands”. It reminds us of the
actual nature of the resource, and, by way of legitimate negative connotation,
of the drawbacks associated with it. Sadly the media have capitulated on the
point, referring to the stuff obediently as “oil sands” ever since the
Conservatives won a majority, or so it seems to me.
By the way, I also insist on referring to
the Tar Sands region as the Athabasca, and not as Fort McMurray, out of respect for the First
Nations people who first named the place, and who, incidentally are among the
most directly affected by the pollution flowing from the industry there. It is an
obvious measure, and the very least we might do to help counter the propaganda
we are being fed.
But maybe you are not convinced. Why should
we take a closer, deeper look at this supposedly promising industry?
The main reason is that we, under the
current “leadership”, are collectively investing in the tar sands as the
backbone of our economic future. This is the dawn of Harper’s dream of the
great Canadian petro-state, like it or not. The so-called prosperity, however,
has a downside: many drawbacks, and unsavoury consequences that we will have to
live with for generations to come. “Tar” represents thinking about this darker aspect
of the so-called prosperity. “Oil” represents the wishful thinking that
pretends away the problems while focusing on the money.
After all, the free market logic will
always focus on the money, on the sheer volume of “oil” and on the jobs that
will stem from the industrial development, effectively acting as a bribe, so as
to collectively ignore the downside and consequences represented by the word
“tar”. (More on the economics of “tar” below…)
But first, more on the Tar itself:
Unlike our beloved oil, this resource is
not “light and sweet”. Rather, it is cruder than crude, and it sits in the
ground in the most inconvenient of ways, requiring some of the most
industrially intensive methods of extraction on the planet. There may be a lot
of it, but the advantages of abundance, if any, are hampered by some pretty
undeniable facts and hurdles of natural physics. For one thing, the drawdown of
fresh water, and the resultant contamination and storage of waste water is a
huge problem, increasing with every passing year whether production increases
or not.
And then there’s the carbon emissions
factor. Long before a litre of gasoline distilled from Athabasca tar sands (synthetic
crude) reaches a gas tank, say, in Toronto,
it has a carbon footprint of shame that Canadians who are still concerned about
climate change should shun. A country that at one time at least pretended to
care about global warming is slowly slipping down a slope toward the position
as the planet’s worst emissions offender.
Of course, the crude products flowing from
the Athabasca region also have to get to
market, and we are currently discovering that the risks associated with
pipelines and tanker trains are significant, already having blackened the shiny
veneer of our new found prosperity…
Of course, if you’re on the side of the
fence that reaps the economic dividends (the bribe) of the production, you’re
unlikely to be convinced, swayed, or otherwise sympathetic to these expressions
of dissent and opposition. There is however some serious scrutiny that
challenges the conventional wisdom behind the economics of the Tar Sands project.
It just so happens that there are other
drawbacks associated with tar sands production that you rarely hear about in
the national energy conversation, and they are ultimately economic in nature,
casting doubt on the long term viability of Tar Sands extraction in the first
place.
Setting the stage: peak oil and price
Forget the hoopla surrounding the new era
of energy independence and the miracle in fracking for oil. (I’ll not go on
about it here, but I’ll soon touch on this with another post). Global
conventional crude oil production has peaked (circa 2006). What has followed has
been the predictable attempt to make up the shortfall (continued growth)
through other means. The resultant narrative is the story of both fracking, and
of the Athabasca Tar Sands, sold to us (by means of state and industry
propaganda) as the solution to our woes. Crucial to the story though, is the
price spike caused by ever diminishing supplies of the cheap and easy-to-get
oil (That’s what happens after a peak). The current $100 a barrel price makes
for barely profitable operations up in the Athabasca,
and keeps Harper’s fantasy about prosperity afloat. But as much as it is
afloat, the new era in oil ain’t like the good old days.
Flow rate
Part of the Athabasca Tar Sands fantasy was
always about a 5 million-barrels-a-day rate of extraction, which has still not
been achieved. Because Tar trapped in sand does not flow like crude oil,
increasing flow rates is a stupendously gargantuan, and costly proposition
dependent on inputs of energy and water, both of which act as limits on the
ultimate output of synthetic crude. As sure as five million barrels a day is
the dream, seven or ten million barrels a day is at best a pipe dream, or at
worst, a nightmare scenario.
A closer look at the aforementioned “most
industrially intensive methods of extraction on the planet” brings us to the
issue of energy inputs, revealing the biggest economic shortcoming of the
operation: In order to get to the true economic cost of the Tar Sands we have
to consider something called EROEI. This acronym is a scientific measure used
in the industry referring to the “energy return on energy invested”. It is useful
because it effectively circumvents the abstractions and distortions you get
when the economics of energy extraction are measured in money. The principle
amounts to this: for every unit of energy extracted, we have spent x units of
energy up front. In economic terms, it measures the true dividends of any given
energy operation. As an example, light sweet crude extracted from a
conventional Albertan oil field would have yielded an EROEI of anywhere from
80:1 to as much as 100:1. That’s a serious profit margin indeed. By comparison,
the EROEI of the Tar Sands is a mere fraction of its light sweet cousin’s. It
also happens to be harder to measure, given the complexity of the operations,
but the average estimates seem to be around 5:1. Not only is this a dismal
return that is unlikely to change over time, it also happens to be less than
the EROEI of both wind and solar, which sit each at about 8:1.
Without an emotional investment in the oil
industry, you would think the famed “invisible hand” and its partner, the
rational consumer, would gravitate to other ways of investing their energy than
in Tar.
We should be asking a string of hard questions.
Is this the best way in which to invest our
current energy resources? After all,
with such poor EROEI numbers, it is not all certain that the benefits outweigh any
further drawbacks not measured by EROEI, such as environmental impacts. Is this resource
truly the backbone of economic prosperity, or are we investing in an plan
with no real dividends?
We must also ask ourselves “why do we even need
it?” Or better, “why do we think we need it?” Why does the conversation
surrounding energy always involve the illusion/dream of sustaining the current
patterns of consumption at all cost?
Those current patterns are based on the
fantasy that we can all have our own personalised car-centered consumer
“lifestyle” with nothing but optimism about the future. We have been trying to
realise that dream for 60 years now, and where has all the optimism gone? It
left upon the arrival of a realisation that the dream comes with costs, borne
first by the pocketbook, and later by the biosphere, as we force the ecosystems
that support us to absorb all our “externalities”. Ultimately Nature has a say
as to how much we can extract, consume and how much waste we can throw back at
her.
Politically, we too have a say as to how
much “oil sands” nonsense we are willing to accept. Will we have the courage to
accept the costs of saying “no” to the Athabasca Tar Sands project?
More on that crucial question in a future
post…
