Long article on tar sands
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What about the land? “We can almost restore the area to how it was when we found it,” she tells us. Environmentalists grimly call the development the “scar sands” and a score of other unflattering names. Large surface mines such as Syncrude’s are indisputably the most physically intrusive in the region. But, contrary to popular claims, they have left no hellscape in their wakes. What the oil sands’ antagonists routinely fail to mention is that the region’s surface mines are temporary, and that they are not so much growing as they are moving. An area of roughly fixed size is slowly crossing the landscape. Yes, Syncrude’s mine turns an area of beauty into an ugly open wound, but it is an extraordinarily small part of that area — and then they turn it back.
“We are reclaiming as we go,” Robb tells me. “And this is the largest reclamation project in the world.” The company has planted more than 7 million trees, all native species that are painstakingly replaced in accordance with notes taken prior to the start of production. At an overlook point a mile or so from the main production facility, a photograph of scarred mining lands is displayed on a bluff. “This is how it was,” Robb says, pointing to the display. Then she waves at the land in front of us. “And now . . . ”
It is astonishing. The land is flat and pristine. Bison graze in the distance. “It took 20 years to mine out,” Robb smiles, “and then almost twelve to fill back in.” Now, it is a flawless, snow-covered field, and the only sign of disturbance in the area is the pop-pop of propane cannons, triggered by radar to keep the birds away until the reclamation work is finished and the engineers are ready to welcome them back.
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The question of the environmental impact comes up. “We will have an impact,” Reg Curren of Cenovus’s media-relations office tells us. “But not a big one. The great thing about SAGD is that its footprint is tiny. Imagine a postage stamp on an envelope. That’s what we’re looking at here.” I note that, flying into the area earlier, I was hard pressed to see what all the fuss was about. “I just saw endless wilderness with very occasional patches of activity,” I offer. Reg agrees: “Compare and contrast. Calgary is 730 square kilometers. Cenovus’s entire facility is six square kilometers.” This includes “everything”: the land for the plant site, the wells, the roads, the pipelines, the camps. Reg’s colleague Rhona DelFrari adds that “the wells themselves are a small portion of that disturbance. If we talk only about the land disturbance of the well pads, each one is about 0.06 square kilometers. But the wells under that pad access about 75 hectares of oil resource. So the pad is about 8 percent versus the amount of resource accessed.” Those six hectares at Christina Lake are extraordinarily efficient. Cenovus is producing 98,000 barrels of oil per day; when the current expansion is finished, in 2020, the company will have brought this up to 300,000. To put that number in perspective, the entire oil-sands region currently pumps out 1.3 million barrels per day
.... In the hotel’s bar on my final evening, I meet two environmentalist girls who are having dinner with the NBC TV crew. We strike up a conversation. Their lexicon is replete with insistent and earnest calls for “renewable energy” and for doing “something different.” We must have a “conversation,” they say. The “public must get involved!” One of them repeatedly insists that there needs to be a “compromise.” I suggest that this “compromise” is precisely what has happened here: The province of Alberta allows private companies to operate within very strict guidelines and, if they break the rules, they lose their license to manufacture. She doesn’t push back against this directly, but she is “worried” that oil production still has its “drawbacks.” I agree in principle. After all, what doesn’t? But I’m struck by the thought that she’s striving for an impossible perfection and has chosen the wrong target.
... The people I meet in northern Canada are selling what the world wants. Ultimately, that is what their opponents hate. ..... People who hate oil hate oil. They don’t want more oil in the world; instead, they desire to replace oil with the mythical energy sources of their choice or, if that is not possible, they want to lower total global energy consumption — the poor be damned.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/392962/whence-keystone-comes-charles-c-w-cooke |
