Customer Reviews

Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent

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Andrew Nikiforuk has done us all a great favour in writing this impassioned book about the Alberta Tar Sands and the social, environmental and political devestation they are causing. Mr. Stephen Harper has revealed himself as the Dick Cheney of Canada, a scheming figure, intellectually in debt to the carbon fuels industry, with great personal integrity and a passionate contempt for democracy, especially parlimentry democracy.

Mr. Nikiforuk begins his book with XXII propositions (I will not repeat them all here) which are a strong call to action for anyone concerned with the environment, Canadian society and politics and the people of the Athabasca. He follows this with a detailed history of the tar sands development and its impacts. Bitumen is a very dirty and inefficent fuel and that we are turning to it as an alternative shows how far we have gone down the road of carbon degredation. Nikiforuk points out that integrating the North American energy market around fossil fuels will effectively remove what ever political independence Canada has (a long time goal of the Harper Conservatives) and will reconstitute Canada as a client energy slave of the US. It will make it impossible for Canada to meet any international agreements on carbon reduction (another goal of the Harper Conservatives) and lock Canada into a path of declining international relevance as the world moves into a post-carbon economy and a devestated landscape.

After reading this book I went over to Google Maps and cruised around the Fort McMurray and the enviromental disaster in the making is already clearly visible.

This book reinforces how important it is to stop Harper and his carbon fueled political machine. At the very least, the tar sands projects should be forced to carry the full cost of all of their externalities - carbon footprint, land restoration, impact on wildlife, social impact ... If these costs were fully factored in it is doubtful that there would be much development in the tar sands. Instead, the federal and Alberta governments are selling out the Canadian tax payer for short term gain, though most of the gain will go to a very few Canadians and Americans. The rest of the world will suffer from carbon emmissions and the loss of a wonderful river and wilderness.

I suspect that our grand children will ask us in horror and disbelief why we thought that burning complex and beautiful hydrocarbons was a good way to create energy when we had so many other options available.

A thorough examination of the consequences of the tar sands project in Alberta. The author looks at this situation from a number of angles, including the project's water and methane usage, the wasting of the Athabascan watershed and millions of acres of boreal forest, the ruinous air quality in the area where the bitumen is refined, the devastation of community and economy in the area surrounding Fort McMurray, the contribution dirty oil makes to climate change, the possibility of nuclear reactors being used simply to help power the project, the failure of the project to benefit the citizens of Alberta, the redirection of the oil itself to the United States, and the growing "Saudi Arabization" of Canada and particularly of Alberta.

My biggest complaint with the book is that the author all but ignored making any consideration for the Dene people, whose ancestral land is being turned into a moonscape in the name of "energy security". I also disliked the author's nonsensical belief that driving less is an effective means of helping to halt the tar sands project. As a non-driver, I do not believe this. I can understand a corporation using the "It's up to individual consumers to change things" remedy to social and environmental ills, but it's depressing to hear it come from the social and environmental activists themselves.

I am drawn to write a review of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent after reading the negative reviews of Nikiforuk's book. He does like to paint a vivid picture, and sometimes lapses into hyperbole, but the wealth of information in here is comprehensive and well-sourced in an extensive bibliography. This book covers the history, culture, production, corruption, social impacts, and ecological devastations of the Tar Sands oil extraction in Alberta, Canada. The author also provides his own predictions (as terrible as that may seem), and offers a set of common sense solutions. The corruption of local and national political forces by big oil conglomerates, however, makes any of the solutions presented difficult to imagine really occurring.

This book gives necessary background on an important and colossal, yet somewhat hidden from Americans, ecological rape happening to the North American continent. My only criticism is that I wish he had included more perspectives from First Nation people such as the Athabascan nation. This is a book to read, and then get angry over, and then move to become active in promoting environmental justice and sanity over the extreme greed of the oil industries.

It takes over three times as much fossil fuels to extract tar sands oil as it does for extracting oil from conventional sources. Each barrel of tar sands oil produced requires the consumption of four barrels of water and the equivalent energy to three barrels of oil.

It takes four tons of earth from the tar sands to produce one barrel of oil

Ninety percent of water used in tar sands extraction cannot be returned to the Athabasca River due to quality issues.

Tar sands could ultimately strip mine 2,000 square miles of Canada's Boreal Forest, an area equivalent in size to Idaho and Montana's vast Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness or the State of Delaware. Representing one-quarter of the earth's remaining intact forests, the wetlands and woods of Canada's Boreal Forest are home to 40% of North America's waterfowl and 30% of its songbirds, and it comprises one of the world's greatest carbon sinks.

Since 1973, Enbridge Energy Partners, a pipeline company building tar sands pipelines in the US, has been responsible for spills that have released over five million gallons of hazardous liquids. Between 2003 and 2008, pipeline accidents caused by Enbridge were responsible for 29 injuries, 13 deaths, and $699 million in property damage.In 2009 alone, Enbridge reported 89 spills. In the summer of 2010, nearly one million gallons of tar sands fuel spilled into a tributary of Michigan's Kalamazoo River, and 250,000 gallons leaked out of an Enbridge pipe in a neighborhood near Chicago, Illinois.

According to a study published in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology in September 2010, birds are dying in Tar Sands tailings ponds by at least 30 times the rate previously reported by the Alberta provincial government and industry. Over the 14 years included in the study, the median bird-death rate was 1,973 per year, and according to the study's author, the number is probably far higher, since nighttime deaths and birds that sink under water were not counted. In a single disaster in 2008, 1,600 ducks died after landing in a tailings pond.

[This review covers the 2010 Revised and Updated version]

Given the upcoming Canadian election, in which the subject matter may
figure strongly, I felt it was essential to give this book a better and
more balanced review (Stephen Harper may not be a robot, but he definitely
runs on oil). The issues under discussion are complicated, which make it
very difficult to write a balanced and fair review. And so ...

This book was very bad for my blood pressure. I really had no idea that
things were this bad. I suppose the natural tendency when reading a book
like this is want to shoot the messenger. There is plenty of bad news here,
a long list of mismanagement and short-term thinking. Even if only a fraction
of it is true, there is plenty to be upset about. But the author is a journalist
and quotes his sources. So even if you discount him as a muck-raking hack I
think you will have to acknowledge the skill with which he determines the
funding (and therefore bias) of the various bodies. He follows the money.

The business of business is making money, at minimal cost. If they can pass
their clean-up costs onto the public, then it is their job to do so (because
otherwise a less scrupulous competitior will, scooping the market). Every parent
has had to deal with this line of logic (if everyone else was jumping off a cliff,
would you too?). In any case, it is for government to require business to absorb
their externalities. The writer documents, in rich detail, how poor a job regulators
have done in this regard. Mining outfits almost never clean up after themselves:
bankruptcy may be a much attractive option.

On the potential clean-up costs:

---- Dr. Lee Foote, a wetland specialist at the University of Alberta, con-
servatively calculates that it will cost at least $10,000 to reclaim one
acre of lost wetland in the tar sands. In jurisdictions such as West Vir-
ginia, industry must restore three acres of wetland for every acre lost
because wetlands perform so many crucual ecological services. Some
scientists suggest a ratio of 10 to 1 would be healthier. Given that
237,000 acres of wetlands have been dug up to date in the tar sands,
Foote estimates that the eventual cost of replacing wetlands could range
anywhere from $2.4 billion to $24 billion. He qualifies even those fig-
ures. "It's a significant liability if it can be done at all," says Foote.
-------- Pages 107 - 108

Some critics have argued the topic cries out for a better book. Well, if they
dislike this title, I am sure they will hate the William Marsden book. The author
does seem to have done his job and taken the time to gather all of the relevant
information (or at least as much of it as was available - there seems to be a
remarkable poverty of solid Canadian research). Which leads into yet another
criticism - that the author only quotes American references. Well, it seems that
the only reliable research has been done in the US. The author has a number of
suggestions as to why that may be the case, which I will not get into. However,
it made me sad to hear about how the careful structures put in place by the
Loughheed administration had been emasculated and weakened by patronage
appointees [this would probably make a good book all by itself].

On the flaws of 'economic growth at all costs':

---- Nearly thirty years ago, U.S. physicist Albert Bartlett wrote a
paper called "Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis." Though
it remains largely unread among politicians, it offers a perceptive anal-
ysis of the tar sands frenzy: "We must realize that growth is but an
adolescent phase of life which stops when physical maturity is reached.
If growth continues in the period of maturity it is called obesity or can-
cer. Prescribing growth as the cure for the energy crisis has all the logic
of prescribing increasing quantities of food as a remedy for obesity."
-------- Page 144

---- "the promotion of growth is simply a sophisticated way to steal
from our children." [Quoting economist David Brower]
-------- Page 135

A number of critics have attacked this work based upon its title. My
Concise Oxford dictionary did not have an entry for 'tar pits' [although it
had an entry for 'Newspeak']. It did have entries for both 'oil-sands' and
'oil-shale' but these both referred to petroleum and not bitumen. While it
seems that bitumen can indeed be refined into petroleum, this seems to be
stretching the words beyond their intended meaning. So if we're going to get
all Humpty-Dumpty about terms, I think we must let the author use his own.
And in this the author is following historical precedent, in fact he quotes
historic texts which refer to the Alberta bitumen deposits in exactly these
terms. By the same token, we still refer to the La Brea Tar Pits, Carpinteria
Tar Pits, and McKittrick Tar Pits - all of which are in fact bitumen deposits.
While it serves the authors purpose to refer to the Alberta bitumen deposits
as tar sands (see, for instance, Chapter 2 - It Ain't Oil) I believe he makes
his case fairly well.

The style of writing may not please all readers; while there is a
genuine attempt to spice up the rather dry material, the persistent problem of
astronomical amounts being discussed leads to endless talk of football stadiums
worth of deforested soil and millions of houses full of toxic gases, Olympic
swimming pools full of contaminated water, and the like. Even so, this is all
an attempt to render the very large amounts at human scale. The author often
uses a very muscular style - which is frequently very funny ['For every Ph.D.
there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.'] but may alienate some readers. Even so,
the author must be applauded for trying to retain the readers interest.

Here is an example, on the logic of CCS:

---- Ultimately, CCS is a form of petroleum narcissism. It burns more
energy and thereby extends the life of fossil fuels. It extends the pre-
tence that carbon is not connected to dirty oil and that business as
usual in the tar sands is sustainable. It assumes that naive taxpayers
will pick up the multibillion-dollar tab and that neighbouring commu-
nities will gladly assume the risks of living downwind from potentially
leaky CCS cemeteries.
-------- Page 143

One critic referred to the author as a Canadian Nationalist, which seems
a very odd comment to make. Is patriotism somehow suspect? Does flag-waving
make someone unreliable or untrustworthy? What is the opposite of a Canadian
Nationalist, a Pro-American? Someone who advocates that we sell our national
assets to the highest bidder, regardless of domestic need? A carpet-bagger?

There is also some discussion of the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate (pages 134 - 136),
which - paraphrasing - describes the paradox whereby supply-side improvements are
inadequate to deal with a demand-side problem. In fact, they usually serve to increase
consumption. Simply put, almost all energy-related innovation and conservation has
merely served to increase energy use, never to actually reduce our dependence on the
limited supply of fossil fuels available.

On how we arrived at the current situation by failing to employ technology:

---- Bitumen can't be sucked out of the ground like Saudi Arabia's black
gold. It took an oddball combination of federal and provincial scientists
and American entrepreneurs nearly seventy years from the time of
Mair's visit to the tar sands (and billions of Canadian tax dollars) to
figure out how to separate bitumen from sand. They finally arrived at a
novel solution: brute force.
-------- Page 15

[Needless to say, this approach is extraordinarily capital-intensive]

On the boomtown mentality and the failures of regulation:

---- Simple regulation and air monitoring could force industry to plug
all the holes in its equipment. Unlike Alberta, European countries rou-
tinely audit and compel repairs to their refineries. The main obstacle to
reducing air pollution and conserving nearly a billion dollars' worth of
hydrocarbons a year, says PTAC, is Canada's tar sands factor, a frantic
demand for more oil and gas production that "competes for capital and
people."
-------- Page 139

The 'growth at all costs' advocates generally opt for using unproven
science to deal with the byproduct issues. Chief amongst these is CCS
(Carbon Capture & Storage / Sequestration). The American EPA estimates that
these sites will need to be closely monitored for hundreds or thousands of
years. Given the book's documented failure(s) of Canadian regulatory agencies,
it is not surprising that the author is critical. What is more surprising is
that he does not comment on the delicious irony of removing a carbon-rich
compound from the ground at huge expense, processing it heavily (again at huge
expense) to produce synthetic oil, and then processing it heavily once more
(also at huge expense) to produce a new carbon-rich form - to be buried
underground.

My conclusion:

For the record, Nikiforuk believes production should be capped at
2 millions barrels per day with a sunset clause (Page 219). This makes
him - to my point of view anyway - a moderate. Softer points of view,
such as that of professor Mark Jaccard, believe that fossil fuels are
not in short supply but that we should prepare for eventual shortages.
This 'soft landing' advice was timely when Jimmy Carter gave it back in
the early seventies but sadly out-of-date in the present era.

The dirty secret is that the majority of greenhouse gas emissions
are produced "well to wheel". In other words, too many cars are making
too many short trips with too-small payloads. All very preventable - but
ever-increasing levels of taxation have failed to put even a modest dent
in the amount of single-passenger short trips. Or in average engine size.

Even if we give credence to the outrageous claims of Middle East reserves,
the growth in demand for oil makes shortages inevitable. Nuclear, which is
also very heavily dependent upon both energy and water, will only serve to
delay the inevitable. (In fact, with the entry on the world stage of emerging
economies such as India and China, we can only expect the global demand for
energy to increase sharply.) But by all means, please read the book and draw
your own conclusions.

You wouldn't want to read this book if you wanted other than a superficial picture of the oil sands. The author is a left-leaning Canadian nationalist with a strong anti-American bias, has a definite political agenda, and is not averse to slanting the facts and statistics to support it. Even the title is misleading. Chemically speaking, TAR is a man-made substance, produced by destructive distillation of organic matter, but the "tar sands" actually contain BITUMEN, an extremely heavy grade of crude oil. (Since I have a degree in chemistry, I find the mislabeling annoying.) The difference between tar and bitumen is important, since an oil refinery would be unable to process tar, whereas it can handle bitumen by using more sophisticated refining processes.

Nikiforuk calls the oil sands "dirty oil", but this is misleading, since there is really no such thing as clean oil - it's all dirty to some degree. Crude oil is usually black, sticky, full of salt water and sand, contains varying amounts of sulfur, and is often contaminated with heavy metals. What you see when you buy a can of motor oil is a refined product, with all the contaminants removed. The author's claim that, "Each barrel of bitumen produces three times as much greenhouse gas as a barrel of conventional oil" is highly misleading. He's comparing it to Arab oil production circa 1960. Even the Arabs need to use more energy these days, and the difference between producing Alberta bitumen versus California Kern River heavy oil is in the range of 10 to 20 percent. More importantly, the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions occur when you burn it in your car, not when it is produced.

Nikiforuk titles one of his chapters, "It Ain't Oil", but Canadians are turning it into oil in large quantities and American refineries are buying it because there's less and less light to medium oil available every year. U.S. oil production has been declining since 1973 and most of its suppliers are also in a state of decline. Even the Arabs are having to resort to their reserves of heavy, high sulfur, vanadium-contaminated oil to meet demand. There's not much of what the author calls "clean oil" left on this planet, and Canada is one of the few countries capable of increasing production, as the result of its vast oil sands.

The section on water use includes a misleading map implying all of the enormous Mackenzie River basin (about the size of the Mississippi) is involved in oil sands development, when only the Athabasca River and (to a lesser extent) the Peace River are. Comparing them to rivers running through Denver and Calgary is misleading since they are much, much bigger, have few industrial users, and there is little need for irrigation that far north. According to the current Alberta government web site data (automatically generated by remote equipment), while the Bow River through Calgary was running at 90 m3/sec, the Athabasca River was flowing at 760 m3/sec - over 8 times as much water. As for the South Platte River in Denver, "Treated wastewater effluent can account for as much as 100 percent of streamflow" - it all flows through people's toilets. In contrast, over 95% of the water in the Athabasca flows into the Arctic Ocean unused, even with oil sands development - it's one of the least used rivers in the world. By the way, Canada is a metric county and oil, gas and water are measured in cubic metres (note spelling), with conversion to U.S. units at the U.S. border, but the book converts everything to U.S. units with no sign of metric - and uses U.S. spelling as well. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it is to disguise the fact that the data doesn't match the original numbers very well.

The tailing ponds used to settle out fine silt from the mining operations are certainly an environmental concern, but are not much more toxic than the original oil sands. Nikiforuk talks about destruction of the "wetlands" of northern Canada, but the stuff is better known up north as muskeg - vast peat bogs which make building roads and cultivating farms difficult. It's one of the reasons that Canada has more land area than the U.S. but fewer people than California. The forest he describes as untouched has burned down repeatedly in massive forest fires once or twice per century, and last burned down in the 1960s, but it bounces back rapidly every time it is destroyed. It is true that the oil companies would have trouble restoring its natural bogginess after mining, but they intend to turn it into grazing land, bring in herds of buffalo, and put picnic tables on it. Since agriculture and tourism are more valuable industries than forestry, the Alberta government has approved this conversion. It's not exactly the mountaintop removal that the author compares it to.

Nikiforuk rails against the idea of disposing of carbon dioxide using carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), but the oil companies love it because injecting CO2 into a depleted oil field improves the oil recovery rate. The Weyburn, Saskatchewan project he mentions actually injects CO2 from a coal gasification plant in North Dakota, was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, and is estimated to have doubled the oil recovery rate of the field. Similar, but much bigger CO2 injection projects exist in Texas, but they are injecting gas from CO2 fields in the area, not disposing of greenhouse gases.

The author condemns Alberta's low royalty rates as a corporate rip-off, but does not compare them to Saskatchewan and British Columbia, which are its immediate competitors for investment money - when Alberta raised its royalties recently, it caused a stampede of drilling rigs to those two other provinces. He also makes the ludicrous statement that the U.S. Gulf states don't have any taxes. Of course they have taxes, just not necessarily income taxes. Texas has a sales tax but no income tax (neither does Florida), Alberta has an income tax but no sales tax (neither does Montana or Oregon), but neither government can get by on oil revenues alone. However, having oil revenues certainly helps governments pay their expenses without raising taxes.

When he talks about politics, the authors leftist biases come to the fore. His characterization of Alberta as a "petrotyranny" is ridiculous because Alberta voters have elected the type of government they want - quite different from the type of government Nikiforuk would like them to have. The Alberta government could best be described as populist, rather than "neoconservative", as he would have it. Alberta voters are generally conservative, at least by Canadian standards, and prefer a combination of low taxes, high quality schools, and good roads, without a lot of government interference in business. Nikiforuk would like the people to have higher taxes, (particularly sales taxes, which Albertans traditionally hate), not to make any money from their vast natural resources, and to support a wide variety of socialist goals that they don't like. Albertans don't support these goals, hence his contention that they must have been misled because otherwise they would agree with him.

At the end of it all, the author comes up with a series of recommendations that would probably be disastrous for Canada and the U.S. The reality is that the world's conventional oil reserves are badly depleted, all the major oil fields are in rapid decline, and oil sands are the only game left in town. Despite what he says, its major oil suppliers (other than Canada and Saudi Arabia) are suffering declining production rates, and China is becoming a major competitor for imports. The U.S. is out of options, out of time, and out of money, so it has a choice between oil sands or nothing. Canada will probably take advantage of the global economic downturn to reduce the rate of development somewhat, but despite Nikiforuk's rhetoric, having some oil sands development is probably better for Canada and the U.S. than having none at all.

Tar Sands is one of those books that cause action for change. Although bias, this novel is an eye opener to what takes place behind the scenes to filling up your car at the pump or doing an oil change. Our society is becoming dependent on oil but we have the technology to defer from this source of energy. Tar Sands is a motivator to question our own habits and evaluate how each and every one of us can make a change, or let our future generations pay the price.