Aw. Pretty, isn’t it?
This is a picture of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, somewhere between Lake Louise and Jasper (sorry, it was a long journey, I lost track of where exactly we were). You are looking at the playground of grizzly bears, black bears, elk and mountain lions, to name but a few of the weird, wonderful, and downright dangerous creatures that Parks Canada went to great lengths to warn us about. Not far from this spot is the Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Icefield, the last remaining fragment of a mighty ice sheet that once covered most of Western Canada’s mountains . Here’s a random fact about glaciers that you won’t know unless you’ve been near one: they “sing”. When the wind blows through their many narrow cracks and crevices, there’s a high pitched humming sound, a bit like that which results from blowing on the rim of a glass bottle half filled with water, except on a somewhat larger scale.
The Athabasca Glacier, the Columbia Icefield and Jasper National Park, in which they are situated, are facing one heck of a threat. For the last 125 years, the Athabasca Glacier has been retreating, due to, yep; you guessed it, a warming climate. This monument to the last Ice Age has lost half its volume in the last century, receding a total of 1.5 km¹. Now I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, in the grand scheme of things, and yes, I know that there’s no way we could know how much the glacier might have receded if the planet’s thermostat hadn’t jumped an average 0.76°C in the last hundred years . But when you consider the distinct possibility that this enormous river of ice has been hanging around quite happily since the end of the last Ice Age, that is, for the last 10,000 years, it puts this recent melting into perspective. And, if you really trust the author that much, which you shouldn’t by the way, you can take my word that the walk between the sign that marks the position of the glacier’s foot in 1950 and the actual foot of the glacier is a lot longer than the walk between the sign for the glacier’s foot in 1900 and the sign for 1950.
In an ironic twist, the Athabasca glacier lies in the same province as the scene of what some environmentalists consider to be the most destructive mining project on Earth. You may or may not have heard mutterings about the Canadian Tar Sands before, probably from people you would normally dismiss as eco-nutters, extremists who wear hemp jumpers and claim to be friends with Swampy (that guy that lived in a tunnel to stop a road being built years ago – whatever happened to him, eh?). Well, prepare to suspend your disbelief. Tar sands, which are basically oily sand deposits, are what the likes of BP and Shell have resorted to mining to keep up with our society’s insatiable hunger for the thick black stuff.
In a way, it seems almost unfair to blame the oil companies for wanting to exploit the second largest proven oil reserve in the world – their business, at the moment, is oil, and Alberta Energy reckon there are 173 billion barrels of the good stuff that are economically recoverable from the pristine Canadian wilderness . However, the phrase “economically recoverable” hints at one of the biggest problems with Tar Sands oil production. One reason that the Tar sands have not been exploited up till now is because the mining and production process is extremely energy and resource intensive, and thus costly. So in order to justify the cost of exploiting the Tar sands, oil companies such as BP and Shell have been sitting tight waiting for the price of oil to rise³. Frankly, I’d rather they did because we all know about the almighty screw-ups BP alone is capable of when it tries to cut corners and save a few pennies (*cough* gulfofmexico *cough*). Anyway. The National Energy Board Canada’s estimate for the production of oil sands bitumen for 2015 is 474,000m³ per day, based on the scenario of a sustained high oil price and an economically attractive environment, both of which seem likely³. Try and keep that colossal figure in mind...
As mentioned before, oil sands production is incredibly energy and resource intensive. Extraction alone consumes between 3 – 5m³ of water per m³ of bitumen produced . So, producing 474,000m³ of bitumen a day would use up at least 1,422,000m³ of water, every single day. That is a lot of water. And where does all this water come from? The Athabasca River, which is fed by our friend, the 10,000 year old singing glacier. Believe it or not, the amount of water being used is not the biggest problem - how waste water is dealt with reads like something out of a bad horror film. Currently occupying an area of 140km² are a collection of “Tailings ponds”, where waste water that has been previously used in the mining process is held in storage⁴. Too toxic to release back into the environment, these giant lakes of industrial soup have been shown to contain traces of lead, arsenic, benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which, depending on their structure, can be highly carcinogenic⁴. Expensive to maintain, it is not known whether any of this poisonous potion has leaked back into the environment; however, an alleged explosion of rare cancers in Fort Chipewyan, a small town downstream from the largest oil sands mining operation, has raised several eyebrows and even more questions . A study conducted in 2009 by Alberta Health Services concluded that the incidence of some cancers in Fort Chipewyan – most significantly, cancers of the digestive, blood and lymphatic systems – were higher than expected, however not dramatically so⁵. Still, in a town with a population of around 1,200, 51 cases of cancer in 47 people between 1995 – 2006 does sound like a statistic that should be ringing governmental alarm bells to me⁵.
At the risk of frying dear reader’s brain with figures, here’s a few more for you to mull over whilst you ponder exactly how far we as a society are prepared to go to throw more fossil fuels on the proverbial bonfire – Canada’s Kyoto emissions target for 2020 is 449,202kt CO₂e³. The Tar Sands mining operation’s greenhouse gas emissions estimate for 2015 based on a sustained high oil price and an economically attractive environment is 80,740kt CO₂e, in the absence of mitigation³. Alberta’s own individual greenhouse gas emissions target for 2015 is, even in the case of a low GDP growth rate, 257,536kt CO₂e, which in 2015 would be 57% of the Canadian Kyoto Protocol emissions target³. I wonder if the government of Alberta realises that a) they’re not the only province in Canada and b) they’re not much of a population centre, with more people living in the big cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Fair targets, or a bow to big business? Here’s something to tell you exactly how seriously greenhouse gas emissions targets are taken in these parts. The Tar Sands mining operation would have to cut CO₂e emissions by 66% in order to stay even within 20% of Alberta’s greedy slice of Canada’s total Kyoto emissions target³. Here’s to daydreams and puddles of water that used to be 10,000 year old singing glaciers.
xx
1. Parks Canada: Athabasca Glacier and the Columbia Icefield - http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/ab/jasper/visit/visit32.aspx
2. IPCC summary notes for policy makers - http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf
3. Climate Change Policy and Canada's Oil Sands Resources - http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/oilsands_report.pdf
4. Carbon Capture and Storage in the Alberta Oil Sands - http://www.co-operative.coop/Corporate/PDFs/Tar%20Sands%20CCS.pdf
5. Cancer Incidence in Fort Chipewyan study - http://www.albertahealthservices.ca/files/rls-2009-02-06-fort-chipewyan-study.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment