Prime Minister Stephen Harper is always ready to spring to the defence of Alberta’s oil industry. He thinks our tar sands product is getting a particularly unfair rap. Just the other day he was complaining that some American banana company does not want to use any gas or diesel fuel made from Canada’s oil. Mr. Harper claimed that our heavy oil pollutes just as much as any other heavy oil.
Do you see how those terrible tar sands are being transitioned? It all started when people found out how much pollution got into the atmosphere when you extracted oil from the Alberta tar sands. The prevailing westerly winds from Northern Alberta are carrying hundreds of tonnes of pollutants across the rest of Canada. Alberta gets billions of barrels of oil and billions of barrels of polluted water while the rest of us get the carcinogens. To solve the problem, some smart oil company guy said: Don’t call it tar sands, call it oil sands.
The only problem is that whether you call it tar or oil, it is still really gunky, heavy stuff that pours like molasses and is full of sulphur. The oil industry calls that heavy oil. It is nowhere near as desirable as the West Texas Light Sweet that always made the best (and the least expensive) gasoline for American-built automobiles.
But Canada and Mr. Harper are stuck with the gunk! What can we possibly do with one of the largest oil reserves in the world? It is rated at about 175 billion barrels and at oil prices around $100 per barrel, there are more than a few people willing to dig it up. But now that he has transitioned the tar sands to heavy oil, Mr. Harper thinks he has solved the problems. He has thrown the gauntlet to the industry to cut the pollution to acceptable(?) levels.
At the same time, he and his friends in the oil industry are going to ‘work hard to get the real information out there.’ He is not going to allow any more misinformation to be getting in the way of maximizing the profits from Alberta’s newly named ‘heavy oil industry.’ The problem for the environmentalists among us is that our economy has to have that oil to survive. We can hardly back up to the days of the horse and buggy.
No doubt, sometime, maybe 50 years from now, the world will have developed technologies to free us from oil dependency. In the meantime, we should make sure that polluters pay to clean up their own messes. And maybe the banana company can explain how they can tell if the gas at the pump came from Saudi Arabia or from Canada.
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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry
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