Recently, President Barack Obama met with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, marking their second official state visit and stirring up more protests against the importing of oil from Alberta's tar 
sands.
Back in February, President Obama made a public statement against continued development of the Canadian tar sands (also known as oil sands) which are expensive and difficult to refine and carry a significantly larger carbon footprint than other oils. In that visit Obama came out in support of green jobs and renewable energy as the solution to the energy crisis and the need for more independence from foreign oil.
Fast forward to the end of the year and it appears that Obama has begun to flip flop on the need to slow global warming pollution and push for renewable energy standards to meet growing energy demands. He recently approved a deal to allow a new pipeline to deliver synthetic crude produced from Canadian tar sands to U.S. refineries. The administration is apparently stuck between wanting to reduce the country's reliance on OPEC and cutting carbon emissions which are having negative effects on the environment. In defense of his change in directions, Obama has said he wants to pursue carbon capture programs with the Canadians-a solution that is likely to have only a small impact on emissions, and not any time in the near future.
Because of the administration's deal with Canada, daily production of 1.2 million barrels from the oil sands is now expected to nearly triple to 3.3 million barrels by 2020. Due to an energy-intesive extraction process, tar sands oil has a much greater carbon footprint than oil tapped from traditional wells. Some studies actually show more fossil fuels being used to extract and refine tar sands crude than are actually produced. In addition, huge tracts of forest must be cleared to remove and process the tar sands, destroying local wildlife habitats and contributing further to global warming.
Some quick facts about the tar sands:
-Oil sands mining is licensed to use twice the amount of fresh water that an entire city the size of San Francisco uses in a year.
-At least 90% of the fresh water used in the oil sands ends up in ends up in tailing ponds so toxic that propane cannons are used to keep ducks from landing.
-Processing the oil sands uses enough natural gas in a day to heat 3 million homes.
-The toxic tailing ponds are considered one of the largest human-made structures in the world. -The ponds span 50 square kilometers and can be seen from space.
-Producing a barrel of oil from the oil sands produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than a barrel of conventional oil.
Read more about recent development in climate regulation here.
Comments
You americans should talk about CO2 production and the tar sands. Your Ohio Valley has hundreds of coal fired electrical plants that spew many many times more CO2 than the tar sands would ever hope to. This smog blanket comes up north to ontario in summer and causes a smog to envelop us. You should look in your own back yard before commenting on others.
Canadian:
Think before you post - Obama brokering this deal with Harper is one of THE main reasons the tar sands production is skyrocketing - and by the way...if Canada didn't make it, AMERICA wouldn't burn it! Think about it.
President Obama and the Canadian's need to know that American ingenuity is alive and well -- and it has already demonstrated the cleanest way to harness Canadian oil sands as well as America's vast but currently untapped trillion-barrel Utah tar sands and Colorado oil shale resources:
www.EncapSol.com/media -- shows this new environmentally-friendly, non-toxic, non-flammable, chemical-based, dry technology that cleanly extracts oil from rocks using NO water nor natural gas and producing NO greenhouse gas emissions nor effluent waste tailing ponds.
See scaled-up equipment actually extracting oil from Utah tar sands: www.EncapSol.com/tar-sands-and-oil-shale-extraction/
America must use environmentally-friendly oil extraction technologies like these to replace our need to import expensive foreign oil.
Might be a useful story if the so-called 'quick facts' were more than just quick. More of the,"I read it somewhere, so it must be true" -- too bad none of it is.
Writer's note:
All of the "quick facts" are accurate and can be cross referenced at the Encyclopedia Britannica website on Tar Sands excavation here: www. britannica.com/facts/5/502472/open-pit-mining-as-discussed-in-heavy-oil-and-tar-sand
Mr. Parker, your President and our Premier agree the world must move to green and renewable energy supplies. Both recognize Canada, Alberta oil sands as a safe, secure, responsible source of oil in that transition. Oil sands oil is not a larger carbon footprint than much of what America uses now, in fact, it's lower than many of America's other oil sources, including (ironically) some California heavy crude. And, GHG emissions from production of oil sands is actually dropping. We've cut 38% per barrel over the last ten years. And we're going to keep cutting.
- David Sands, Government of Alberta
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