Mud, sweat and tears (Alberta tar sands)

[jpak]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/30/energy.oilandpetrol

You've only got to stroll down Hardin Street to the main drag, then hang left and walk a couple more short blocks, to see what Fort McMurray i about. It wouldn't be the whole story, but you would catch the drift. You' pass the Boomtown Casino, strip malls, and a club called Cowboys proudl advertising "naughty schoolgirl nights". Then the Royal Canadian Mounted Polic station, the municipal offices, the Oil Sands Hotel, and Diggers bar, with it advertisement for exotic dancers. You would be passed by Humvees an countless pick-up trucks, each more souped up than the next, many covered i dried mud, many carrying further 4x4s - in winter, snowmobiles; in summer, all-terrain vehicles on which to go chasing through the bush, which is visible from th main street. And if the wind is from the north-west, you can smell oil on the air heavy, slightly sour, unmistakable. Round here, they call it the smell of money

As the Middle East has become more unstable, as Iraq has boiled into chaos, other, more unexpected places have flourished, and none more so than Fort McMurray. Five hours' drive north of Edmonton, in Alberta, it has always been a frontier town, and even before the first white explorers came fur-trapping, the Indians knew that this place sat on oil - they used it to waterproof their canoes. The trouble has always been that it's not conventional crude, easily liberated from the earth, but tar sands (also known as oil sands) - a mixture of sand, water and heavy crude which is much more difficult and expensive to extract. It can cost about Can$26 ($US27; £13) a barrel to do so - so when that was comparable to the price of oil, there was no point in trying; now that oil is close to breaking the $100-a-barrel barrier, there definitely is.

For years there were only two outfits mining the Athabasca oil sands, which occupies 141,000 square kilometres; now there are seven, including Shell, whose first plant became operational in 2003, the year the Iraq war started (the remaining four have not yet started production). Eventually, Shell alone intends to extract 500,000 barrels a day, and to do so for 50 years; in total 1.2 m barrels are extracted each day, a number projected to rise, when all the plants are operational, to 3.5m. The companies intend to invest $100bn in the area in the next 15 years; if oil prices stay as they are, or rise, and once the capital costs are paid off, they're playing for possible profits of tens of billions a year - much of which will come from America, gleeful at this sudden access to so much "safe" oil right next door.

Current technology means companies can reach only about 10% of deposits, but even that makes the Athabasca oil sands the second largest proven oil reserve in the world. Add in the so far unreachable 90%, and Alberta's oil reserves would be at least six times the size of Saudi Arabia's. Already Canada produces as much oil as Kuwait. Soon it'll be two Kuwaits. Canada is the biggest single supplier of crude oil to the US. Small wonder Canada is increasingly described as the world's next great energy superpower.

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[applegrove]

1. And if Canada is not careful we will become a hollowed out economy,

like the ones in the Middle East, where we manufacture and sell nothing but resources (our dollar will be too high to compete in manufacturing and service industries).

"Small wonder Canada is increasingly described as the world's next great energy superpower." That really is scary. Look at all the world's current energy superpowers. They all have issues.