BP: Alberta, Canada Oil Sands - Here We Come!

Left is a Peter Essick photograph of an open pit oil sands extraction site in Alberta, Canada. This is just the pit. The photos of the processing plants, the sprawl at Fort McMurray, the fish coming out of the Athabasca River, the tailing ponds that hold the toxic sludge; all can be seen in a 2009 National Geographic article about oil sand mining. Tailing ponds - water reused in the expensive, ecologically unsound process of recovering a barrel of synthetic crude from tons of washed sand - are huge, noxious, and are "required" by the Canadian government to be cleaned up. Not one operation has done so yet. Left alone (which the ponds are) tailing ponds will leech toxic waste into the ground and the water table for a thousand years.

There is a picture of a 1000 acre tailing pond in the NG article. It has a radar-controlled mechanical bird that squawks to warn off real birds. If the birds land, they die. Tailings are contained death that seeps into the ground and travels. People 150 miles downriver are developing exotic cancers at an alarming rate. The dust blowing off the wheels of the trucks travels. It is not good dust, as tailing pond water is not good water.

BP (who is still British Petroleum in my mind, begun in 1909 as Anglo-Persian Oil) drew a line in the oil sand today at their annual meeting, when some smart and environmentally sound shareholders, hoping to approve a resolution to review BP's plans to cash in on the oil sands in Alberta, were defeated. BP will reveal the actual results of the meeting in a day or two, and will make their decision by the end of the year. Tally-ho.

Shell Oil will probably quash their shareholders at their own meeting next month. Shell plans to cash in on the oil sands bonanza in Alberta, too.

Oil sands mining is a nasty - maybe one of the nastiest - earth-fouling operations going. It is arduous, expensive, machinery intense, and thus CO2 emission heavy, and then there are the tailing pond leavings. But BP said the project is crucial to meet global energy needs. BP means us. Americans. We are addicted to oil, and we use more of it than any other country in the world. BP is a polluter with a long history of spills and rusted pipelines and cash-chasing earth gouging. The company is spending a boatload of money advertising their "alternative energy" strategies. Oil sand extraction is not alternative energy, any more than "clean coal" or nuclear energy is alternative energy.

50 years from now, when there are no more Alberta wilderness adventure sites on the internet, no more guided fishing on the Athabasca River, no more Atlin-Taku Watershed, no more boreal forest, nothing but tailing ponds and abandoned communities; when the oil is sucked out of the sand, who will be around to make sure the mechanical bird keeps squawking?