Tar Sands and Shale Oil

Assja Baumgärtner

Anyone who is green-minded, or who uses Facebook, may have spotted the www.avaaz.org petition against the extraction of shale oil for use as road fuel. But what, you may ask, makes it so controversial? The use of tar and oil is nothing new. The Neanderthals knew about these bituminous deposits some 40,000 years ago, and applied it to their stone tools. The Egypt word ‘mummy’ is a synonym for bitumen, which played a major role in the mummification process. The Sumerians and Mesopotamians used bitumen in their building industry, and the First Nations in Canada waterproofed their canoes with it, as did later ship builders in Britain. But back then, bitumen was harvested from places where it seeped out naturally to the surface. What is proposed now is very different.

The extraction of tar sands is one of the most destructive industrial projects humankind has ever devised. In Canada alone, an area larger than England is being excavated at the moment. The Athabasca river delta, once a pristine boreal forest with clean rivers and lakes, has become a devastated waste. The trees have gone, and instead there is an industrial desert of open pit mines and toxic ‘tailings’ ponds where the polluted water used to wash the tar accumulates. There is no known way to clean this water. Birds landing in it quickly die, and fish in nearby waters regularly develop tumours. The First Nations communities that for centuries hunted and fished in the lost forest are now suffering from abnormally high rates of cancer and immune diseases.

In Estonia, shale oil has been mined for almost two centuries, but its own records show that in 2002, 97% of air pollution, 86% of total waste and 23% of water pollution came from that industry. It also produces large quantities of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

We know of course that the world’s ‘easy’ oil sources are running out. The rise in petrol and diesel costs makes that obvious. Excuses such as the Iraq war and the unstable situation in the Middle East mask the basic truth, which is that the dealers controlling the release of oil for sale are keeping the price up. There was a flurry of indignation when some nations decided to release some of their own oil reserves in order to challenge this monopoly grip, but nothing has basically changed.

Canada’s tar sands are replacing Saudi Arabia as America’s main source of oil – but at huge environmental cost. The steam process used to extract the crude oil emits 50 kg of CO2 per barrel into the air – but that’s not the end of it. To change 1 barrel of bitumen into crude liquid oil involves the burning of 28 cubic m of conventional gas, equivalent to 1 giga joule of energy – a sixth of the energy output per barrel of the crude oil. These costs do not factor in the energy use or exhaust output of the big earth removal machines and transportation tankers.

Our world runs on oil. The petrochemical industry makes possible every journey by road, sea or air. It supplies our household machinery, our pesticides, pharmaceutical products, fertilisers and building materials, our computers and our children’s toys. But does that give us licence to encourage oil extraction techniques that threaten the continuation of the planet? Quite clearly, the answer for our financial institutions is an unashamed Yes. The Royal Bank of Scotland has contributed more than £ 5.6 billion to companies involved in Canadian tar sand projects, and is continuing to do so. Representatives of Canada’s First Nations attended the RBS AGM of in April to voice their opposition to the bank’s backing of this destructive process, but the complaints of the indigenous people were not acknowledged at the AGM, and were largely ignored by the media.

The European Union is introducing an important bill that seeks to impose strict pollution standards on car and lorry fuels and will effectively ban tar sands fuel. The UK is opposing it. There will be many people who are appalled by this. If you want to dissent from this attempted wrecking of a bill that would bring some control over a filthy and destructive industry, sign the petition against it. You can find it on the Voice for Arran Facebook page, or just go to Avaaz, the brilliant international site that channels opinion from all over the world about things that really matter.

Scotland’s online magazine, the Scottish Review, recently carried a piece on the oil outlook by our editor.