Epsom and Ewell Energy Group

‘Apocalyptic beauty’ … Petropolis. Photograph: Jiri Reza

A review of the film in the Guardian, (May 2010) says:   

This timely oil industry documentary from Greenpeace is only 43 minutes long, but stunning, fugue-like aerial photography justifies its cinema release. The footage was shot from a helicopter over the remote Canadian tar sands, where a massive operation is underway to extract oil from beneath forest and wetlands. The visuals lull us dreamily, gliding over mile after mile of glossy green treetops before catching a glimpse of mine-scarred landscape, which has its own kind of apocalyptic beauty. Giant smokestacks and monster trucks give the impression – like the underground M-machine in Metropolis – of an ungodly engine. The overall effect is something like Koyaanisqatsi, the disturbed sense of the world out of kilter. Blessedly free of a celebrity voiceover, there’s just a blippy minimalist soundtrack for company until a short narration at the end by director Peter Mettler, who was the cinematographer on Manufactured Landscapes.

There is a lot about oil sands (tar sands) on Wikipedia at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands

Greenpeace Canada says:

Greenpeace is calling on oil companies and the government to stop the tar sands and end the industrialization of a vast area of Indigenous territories, forests and wetlands in northern Alberta.

The tar sands are huge deposits of bitumen, a tar-like substance that’s turned into oil through complex and energy-intensive processes that cause widespread environmental damage — polluting the Athabasca River, lacing the air with toxins and turning farmland into wasteland. Large areas of the Boreal Forest are being clearcut to make way for development in the tar sands, the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.

Greenpeace is also concerned with the social and health costs. First Nations communities in the tar sands report unusually high levels of rare cancers and autoimmune diseases. Their traditional way of life has been threatened. Substance abuse, suicide, gambling and family violence have increased in the tar sands. The thousands of workers brought in by oil companies face a housing crisis in northern Alberta.

Greenpeace is working to stop the tar sands by:

Greenpeace UK says:

About the tar sands

BP rebranded themselves as ‘beyond petroleum’. And yet, in their search for new sources of oil, BP is about to make a decision on whether to invest billions of pounds into the Canadian tar sands – the dirtiest oil currently being produced. In doing so, they are not only threatening the Canadian wilderness, they are also threatening to accelerate dangerous climate change, at precisely the time we should be cutting carbon emissions.

Disaster for the Albertan wilderness and people

The tar sands are already the biggest industrial development anywhere on Earth, and also the biggest opencast mining operation.

The tar sands deposits of heavy oil mixed with clay and sand lie below the surface of the Canadian wilderness. To extract the tar, oil companies clearcut the Canadian boreal forest, gouge out hundreds of metres of topsoil, and turn the landscape into a gaping black pit. Two tonnes of earth has to be dug up and processed to produce each barrel of bitumen. The tar sands are producing 1.35 million barrels a day.

The huge lakes of toxic sludge that fill with the toxic water used in the operation are poisoning the Albertan landscape and water supplies. The impact falls heavily on the First Nations indigenous people of the area. George Poitras, a member of Mikisew Cree indigenous First Nation, says: “My people are dying, and we believe British companies are responsible … UK oil companies like BP … are extracting the dirtiest form of oil from our traditional lands, and we fear it is killing us.”

If the bitumen is too deep to be mined, the oil companies inject high-pressure steam into the ground, to blast the oil out of the sand and up to the surface. This is called ‘in-situ’ extraction, and as oil companies begin to go after the tar sands deposits that are deep underground, it’s lined up to be the extraction method of the future.

In-situ extraction doesn’t create the same enormous opencast pits, but to install the gas piping, roads and rigs it requires still means cutting a swathe through the Canadian boreal forest, destroying the habitat of many plants and animals, and driving many local wildlife species to extinction.

Disaster for the planet

It’s very carbon-intensive to produce oil from the tar sands. The site that BP is planning to invest in will produce about three times the emissions per barrel of oil than you would get from normal crude. The steam used in the extraction is produced by burning huge amounts of natural gas – in energy terms, it’s up to seven times less efficient to get oil from the tar sands than it is from normal crude.

On any rational assessment of what’s happening to the climate, there’s no way tar sands make any sense. This is the most polluting source of oil in existence. So how do BP square wanting to invest in tar sands with their claims to being committed to addressing climate change?

The answer is simple. BP are assuming that tackling climate change isn’t profitable. Their tar sands plans are based on projections of oil use that will cause a doubling of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by the end of the century, with an associated global temperature rise of around six degrees.

So it looks like BP’s business model of investing in tar sands and other ‘unconventional oil’ only makes sense if you assume that the climate is going to be out of control by the end of the century. Not really ‘beyond petroleum’, is it?

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/tarsands/tar-sands.html