The Alberta Tar Sands are the globe’s last big time oil field with every major oil company involved. It’s the world’s largest energy project, the world’s largest construction and the world’s largest capital project and, hard as it is to believe in this day and age, there’s been no comprehensive assessment of its environmental, economic, or social impact.
It should be noted that Canadais the largest supplier of oil to the US amounting to 1/5th of their needs. To steam out “bitumen” (as the stuff is called), the industry burns enough natural gas to heat 6 million homes.This, noted a wag, is like using caviar as manure for a turnip patch. These projects gobble up water from the Mackenzie River basin at an annual rate of a two million population city and kill a forest the size of Florida.
Who’s this all in aid of? Of course the United States but earlier this year China’s Sinopec Oil Company agreed to pay ConocoPhilips $4.6 billion for a 9% interest in their Tar Sands project.
Here’s a critical point – both the pipelines and tanker traffic are unalterably opposed by First nations, the name we now use instead of Indians. Moreover, the federal government has a moratorium on tanker traffic on the BC coast.
How big a deal is this? What are the international implications? They are huge. The bitumen, literally sand soaked in oil making a thick sludge, is mixed with natural gas so it can move down a pipeline. Leaving aside pipelines in Alberta, the sludge is to be taken to market by two British Columbia pipelines, one owned by Kinder Morgan ending in Vancouver and another, to be built, terminating on the BC northern coast at Kitimat, where it will be taken to market by tanker.
Here’s where, pun intended, it gets sticky. Canada is a federal state and both the federal government and individual provinces have inherent powers under the constitution and some, including the environment are shared. Add to that the inherent rights of First Nations, getting that sludge to the BC coast from Northern Alberta carries with it a problem or two.
But, it’s not just the pipelines that are a problem because once the bitumen reaches Kitimat it’s to go on tankers which must thread their way through some of the most hazardous sea routes in the world, not far from the Alaska coast where the Exxon Valdez sank in 1989. According to Environment Canada, a federal government department scarcely known for wild eyed environmentalists, says that the 300 tankers that would be used would expose BC coastal waters to average spills of 1000 barrels every four years and 10,000 barrels every nine years. Environmentalists point out that one can only guess at the severity of the spill but that spills will happen. In fact, simple logic tells you that a risk unbounded by time or frequency, is no longer a risk but a calamity waiting to happen.
We’ve got ahead of ourselves here because we haven’t got the sludge to port yet. The stuff that’s going to Vancouver was a secret until very recently when an accountant, staring out his office window, observed an increasing number of massive tankers going through the first of two treacherous narrows in the harbour and asked what they were all about. It turned out that these ships, with more to come, were loaded with tar sands sludge. This traffic which must pass through another narrows in the harbour then negotiate a very difficult passage through the dangerous Juan De Fuca Strait to the ocean, thence China, an issue in itself being vigorously opposed by environmental groups.
The pipeline from the Tar Sands to Kitimat which goes through the most sensitive wild life areas of the province is proposed by Enbridge, a huge company with an appalling safety record. This mega-project would involve two 1,170 kilometre pipelines one carrying the sludge to Kitimat, the other carrying the stuff they mix with it back to the Tar Sands. These pipelines would cross approximately a thousand streams and rivers, many of which are in the Skeena and Upper Fraser watersheds, being B.C.’s most important wild salmon rivers.
Four months after the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration cited Enbridge for improper corrosion monitoring on a 40-year old pipeline, it failed and spilled one million gallons into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, much more than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez. Between 1999 and 2008 Enbridge recorded 610 spills!
Environmental groups are fighting this proposal tooth and nail and it will be defeated – if not by them, certainly by First Nations.
What’s been called an “unprecedented” alliance of more than 150 First Nations groups, environmentalists, unions, and have vowed, in the words of one Chief, to use “every possible means” to stop Enbridge from sending this bitumen by pipeline to Kitimat and then by tanker down the B.C. coast.
Chief Gerald Amos, director of the Coastal First Nations (an alliance of nine major aboriginal groups), vowed “we will protect ourselves and the interest of future generations because one major oil spill on the B.C. coast would wipe us out” then added that they were serving notice that “it (the pipeline and tanker traffic) isn’t going to happen“
Can these “Indians” have this much power? You bet they can. On November 2 last, Environment Canada refused a multibillion dollar gold mine in this area which would have encroached on native lands.This has enormous implications for the Enbridge proposal, for how can you forbid this mine then allow many times as much encroachment for a pipeline by a company with such a terrible safety record?
One can only speculate on the international implications. If the pipeline is canceled, where will the US and China get the missing oil from? Will they turn to other suppliers in which case who? What, indeed, will be the impact on the world’s petroleum nations?
How would the denial of this pipeline affect Canadian relations with China and the US?One can only guess but powerful nations are not known for taking a punch without returning a huge counterpunch. What that will look like no one knows except it won’t be a pretty scene.
