There's a number of good books on the subject that
all Canadians need to read to understand what's going on with
TAR SANDS development.
TAR SANDS, by Andrew Nikiforuk
STUPID TO THE LAST DROP, by William Marsden
THE TAR SANDS, Larry Pratt
They really should be called tar not oil sands, because the unupgraded bitumen is the consistency of a hockey puck and needs to be diluted with light crude to even be pumped by pipeline to the upgrader factories. It also contains large amounts of minerals that in the words of one industry executive "is abrasive as diamond".
And along with another bizarre character who in the early days wanted to use nuclear warheads to separate the oil from the sand Manley Natland:
'Why not nuke Alberta?' | Macleans.ca - Canada - Features
Also the man that Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove was based on, Herman Kahn, was a strong early proponent for tar sands development in the early 1970. He was of the opinion that nuclear war was not only survivable but winnable and that mankind could do virutally anything it liked as far as industrial development while not jeopardizing our future. Kahn's ideas for tar sands development would have given the US energy independence from foreign oil sources that were unstable at the time at the cost of widespread ecological devastation in Northeast Alberta. He advocated spending $20 billion dollars a decade on 20 oil sands projects. Right now the capital investent in the Athabasca tar sands is over $200 billion for 100 project making it the largest petroleum project in the world and also the largest capital project.
The tar sands are responsible for million of tons of CO2 going into the atmosphere each year and also remove million of acres of boreal forest, one of the largest carbon sinks on the planet. At the same time we're rapidly becoming one of the largest CO2 emitters on the planet we're also destroying the trees and peat bogs that hold several billion tons of carbon.
The ERCB(Energy Resources Conservation Board) in Alberta which is responsible for regulating oil development in Alberta hasn't turned down a tar sands project yet. It's also responsible for collecting royalties which puts it in a conflict of interest as the environment inevitably suffers due to the emphasis on development.
Instead of taking an objective look at the true costs of tar sands development, a gold rush mentality has guided tar sands development. Large tracks of Canadian wilderness have already been destroyed and the long term consequences of the million of tons of CO2 emitted from the project will almost certainly cost billions of dollars in damages in coming years. The technology and markets created by Canadian tar sands development also make developing US unconventional oil deposits more economical. The Utah tar sands and Colorado oil shales also hold many billion barrels of bitumen.
We're helping drive an unsustainable development of energy sources that in our best interests should be left where they are. The Canadian government has devoted several billions of dollars to researching the questionable practice of carbon sequestration to make continued tar sands development even marginally rational instead of comprehensively backing sustainable energy sources like solar, wind/tidal and biomass(not from food as someone here was dishonestly stating earlier). Instead of spending billions of dollars, allowing foreign powers to take over our political control with the assistance of the Conservative government, we could be building a sustainble energy economic model right now. Instead we're rapidly becoming the most pollutiing people on the planet per capita, second only to Australia. By 2030 the Tar sands will have the CO2 footprint of many nations, bigger even than Belgium.
This has mostly happened with little thought, except from some of the nuttier Cold warriors and been allowed to move ahead on autopilot by federal and provincial governments that clearly have stopped being responsive to the needs of the electorate. In many cases there's little information collected on the activities of companies working to destroy the Athabasca region and produce millions of tons a year of atmospheric CO2 at a time when almost all the science tells us this coulde very well be suicide.