Athabasca Tar Sands Harvesting garbage into gold, or worse garbage

As the world is racing to discover new ways to find replacements for the rapidly diminishing stores of fossil fuels,  many have gone into the avenue of looking for the solution via the route of renewable energy. This took on the form of nuclear, biomass, wind, solar, hydro and other innovative, but still untested, means of providing fuel and power for the globally hungry markets for fuel. But there is still one area that the world hopes to find the answer in the fossil fuel area, the Athabaskan tar sand fields in Canada. Whether it is good or bad, the paper seeks to discover whether they are harvesting garbage or gold.

Tar sands Oil or environmental poison
When Charles Mair, the Protestant theologian, fur trader and Canadian nationalist coined the archaic term of Canada First, Mair saw the global upswing in the Fort McMurray area long before the traders and other journeymen saw it. He viewed the area as an inhospitable area given over to barbaric Native American inhabitants and a perpetual cover of frost.  As one of the commissioners in the governments Treaty of Eight body, Mair saw the interest that the government had in the inhospitable region. In a report released by the government in the late 1800s, a report dealing with the regions tar sands called them as the most extensive petroleum field in America, and even went to the extent that the fields will rank among the crown jewels of the Crown. In the report, the area must be declared under the disposition of the Canadian people for their economic benefit (Andrew Nikiforuk, 2008).

As Mair arrived at McMurray, he saw the potential for the grandiose future that the area held for the future of the Canadian nation until he reached that area, all with the tar sands in question, concocting such terms from renowned explorer Alexander Mackenzie, describing the area as bituminous fountains and the ooze  from Federal botany specialist John Macoun  century later.  The tar, oil to some, was observed to be everywhere, escaping from cracks in the cliffs that lent the smell of an old ship in the description of Mair. In Mairs narrative, Through the Mackenzie Basin, he (Mair) averred that the development of what he calls as one of the great natural wonders of northern Canada will result in immense economic benefit for the country (Nikiforuk, 2008).

And the prophecy of Mairs statement has seemingly come to pass. Interest in the oil-bearing sands, or tar bearing sands, has spread beyond the borders of the North American continent, with countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, France and Norway expressing interest to put up investments in the area, as the development of the area, according to statements of the Canadian government, will eventually resolve the dearth of oil needed to power the worlds economies.  The catalyst of this great metamorphosis of the Canadian economy is called bitumen, which former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, himself a son of an oil magnate, calls an ocean of oil soaked sand. This insentient form of oil is now the main driver of the Canadian economy that the old fur trade once held sway over the economy a century back (Nikiforuk, 2008).

Formed by millions of years of cooking, the forces that shaped the region began to cook the remains of hundred million year old flora and fauna, then digested the rest of the carcasses with the action of bacteria. If the cooking was good, the result would be light crude if the cooking was not good, the result would be the tar in the sands. As a result, the increased economic activity of the Canadian economy was anchored on a fuel that was cooked about halfway between raw and medium based on the remains of dinosaurs and plants. Many in the oil sector have an aversion to the term tar, calling it a term of environmentalists. As such, they would rather term oil, as the term connotes cleanliness, abundance and accessibility (Nikiforuk, 2008).

Apart from the terminology semantics, tar does not sound like a term for pouring in investments, and does not assure the public of the anxiety of the increasing prices of fossil fuels. In their opinion, or spin, Canada is not mining a dirty substance or even refining the same it is in the conduct of producing oil. They even describe that technically, oil is what this substance should be called, since what is harvested from this activity is technically oil, expensive and low quality at that. Bitumen is highly pollutive, containing more carbon than an equivalent amount of light crude (Nikiforuk, 2008).

In the past discussion, we have seen the reasonings that the mining of the tar sands, though pollutive, continues to ride the mantra of being beneficial for the Canadian economy on the whole. What with many countries and companies looking to share in the pie of the global oil reserves, why do many state that the mining of the dirty oil is as close to reprehensible as can be Shouldnt something that would contribute billions, if not hundreds of billions of petrol dollars, into the economy should be considered good Here is where the argument of the author takes a turn to state that the mining of the tar sands is more deleterious than beneficial.

Unlike the black gold that is drilled and refined from oil producing nations such as Saudi Arabia, the mining of the bitumen in the tar sands of Athabasca cant be pumped out of the ground, taking nearly seven decades and billions of tax dollars paid by Canadians, trying to figure out a means by which to get to the bitumen in the sands. The final solution they arrived at was to destroy anything on top of the bitumen to harvest the oil. In short, destroy the environment to get to the gold. As currently practiced in mining the oil, the tar in the sand is mined by shallow mining with the use of gargantuan trucks and electric shovels that scrape the tar bearing sands. The other is open pit mining, which fells hundreds of trees, drain the wetlands and tear up four tons of earth to get two tons of bitumen (Nikiforuk, 2008).

At 100,000 a barrel, the bitumen from the Athabasca tar sands field can be considered as the worlds most expensive oil. Apart from scraping and digging for the tar, melting the bitumen is also another means of mining the rock hard substance from the ground. In the process of steam assisted gravity drainage, or SAGD, stem is coursed through the block of bitumen and the melted mass is pumped out of the ground using a complicated system of pipes, pumps, and wells. But the process leaves a huge environmental footprint when in operation (Nikiforuk, 2008).

A SAGD operation will leave roughly 7 percent of the land permanently scarred for hosting wildlife. In the 2008 report of the Cumulative Environmental Management Association, the practice of SAGD in its present form, will displace caribou, fish, bear and moose from an area of roughly one to three million acres. Also, SAGD uses enormous amount of another fossil fuel based energy source, natural gas, so much so that the amount of natural gas used in boiling the water for the steam component of SAGD is enough to power four million homes on the North American for a day. That would mean the amount of work needed to create a barrel of the poor mans oil would be more than the amount of work needed to create a barrel of light crude, yet would render less energy in the process (Nikiforuk, 2008).  

But does the fact that the Athabasca tar sands will yield an immense amount of oil the only reason that the Canadian government turn a blind eye to the environmental havoc that the activity of tar sand mining Sadly, this is not the only primary driver. Rising American demand for oil, and the report o the National Oil Sands Task Force, instead of regulating the use of the area, came up with a report, The Oil Sands A New Energy Vision, promoted the tar sands field as one of the biggest arenas for private sector investment in the service of the public of Western Canada (Nikiforuk, 2008).

On this note is where we can discuss the primary drivers of the surge in the corporate and Federal activity in the Athabasca region. While it was recognized that the conduct of mining the tar from the sands will render irreparable damage to the ecosystem in the region, industry players, mesmerized at the potential in making a killing on their investments, have pressured the government into looking the other way so that the environment of Canada can be destroyed, all in the name of finding another means to pollute the environment. For the government, it was a way to cash in on a natural resource that was inadvertently placed in a region that was teeming with wildlife. But though the book does make a case for the abhorrent mining of the tar in the sands, it does not say anything about remediation on the damaged lands. Probably, the author left this vital piece of information out because there was no means to bring back the land to what it once was and leaving it look like a scene from a nuclear holocaust.

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