Now, the environmental costs and economic benefits
of getting new oil in Canada's western province of Alberta.
Elizabeth Brackett of WTTW-Chicago reports.
Canada is by far the largest supplier of oil to the United States,
sending 1.8 million barrels south every day.
And companies are spending billions looking for more,
digging under stripped-out forests in search of a form of petroleum called bitumen.
Environmental and native groups say the oil,
which they call tar sands oil, hurts the air, land and water.
They point to what it takes to get it to market.
And it takes a lot.
Huge shovels dig the sand and bitumen out of the earth
and pile it into gigantic trucks.
Syncrude, a joint venture among seven oil companies,
runs its equipment around the clock 365 days a year.
A truck will do a round trip in every...anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes,
depending on how long the haul is, typically.
The bitumen is separated out and pumped to the nearby refinery.
The remaining sand and clay, which is highly toxic,
is pumped out into tailing or waste ponds that dot the landscape.
The process uses an enormous amount of energy, according to Simon Dyer.
He works for an institute promoting alternative energy.
The oil sands are the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas pollution in Canada.
On a per-barrel basis, it takes about...
produces about three times as much greenhouse gas pollution
extracting and upgrading a barrel of oil from the oil sands
as conventional Canadian or North American production.
But Alberta's minister of the environment, Rob Renner, insists,
since Canadian oil doesn't have to be shipped,
it's actually no worse for the environment.
We have just concluded a very in-depth study
by an independent third party that considers the life cycle,
sort of the well-to-wheels on any given source of oil.
And the oil sands compare very favorably with conventional oil.
And, he says, Canadian oil is critical to the economies of both countries.
The oil sands are an economic driver for all of Canada.
And much of the industrial heartland of the United States
is contributing very significantly inventory and equipment into the oil sands.
There's no question that it's been good
for the town of Fort McMurray in Alberta, which is booming.
Because it's a boomtown, I can ask for more wages and get more wages.
And it's been good for refinery workers in Midwestern states.
This BP facility in Whiting, Indiana,
just launched a $3.8 billion expansion plan to bring in more Canadian crude.
Union boss Jim Buchanan:
That's our lifeblood.
We will probably have upwards of 1,400 pipe fitters on this particular project.
And there are other advantages, according to industry lobbyist David Sykuta.
It comes from a friendly country that shares our values.
And it comes in a pipeline, rather than a tanker.
And it comes from a democracy, rather than a dictatorship.
To me, those are three things that tend to trump other concerns.
But those other concerns disturb the opponents.
In addition to worrying about CO2 emissions,
they fear what the mining is doing to the water.
Alberta's mining operations lie along the Athabasca River,
part of the third-largest watershed in the world.
George Poitrus thinks leakage of toxic waste from the tailing ponds
is harming members of his Mikisew Cree Nation
that has lived along the river basin for countless generations.
The worst types of cancer that we are seeing are those rare cancers,
cancers that you should find one per case in a population of 100,000.
And we're finding two or three, possibly more.
The company says the seepage into the Athabasca River Basin is insignificant.
But there's no question that tailing ponds can be deadly for wildlife.
Last year, 1,600 migrating ducks
flew into one of Syncrude's tailing ponds and drowned.
The process also uses a lot of water.
It takes between two and four-and-a-half barrels of freshwater
to extract and upgrade one barrel of oil.
Steven Gaudet, who is Syncrude's manager of environmental affairs,
says they're working to change that.
We recycle nearly 85% of our water over and again.
If you were to track one molecule of water through that system,
you would see a recycling of that molecule over 18 times within our process.
And, finally, there is what environmentalists say the mining does to the land.
The wetlands and peatlands that you see flying over this landscape
will never be reclaimed.
And the industry has really a poor track record
of actually dealing with the toxic tailings,
the waste material that's a byproduct of the process.
But Gaudet disagrees.
He points with pride to bison which graze on reclaimed acres.
Syncrude spent $100 million on land reclamation in 2008
and plans to spend the same amount this year.
Here on this site alone, we have reclaimed over 4,600 hectares of land.
And, of that 4,600, we have begun to get those lands
certified with the provincial government.
And, last year, we had 100 hectares certified as being fully reclaimed.
One hundred hectares, or 257 acres,
means only 0.2% of the mined area has been fully restored
since mining operations began in Alberta in 1967.
The industry says a lot of the land will be saved
by a new method called 'steam-assisted gravity drainage', or SAGD,
instead of open pit mining.
At this ConocoPhillips SAGD facility outside of Fort McMurray
steam is sent to the wellheads and injected into the ground.
The steam softens the bitumen until it is fluid enough to be pumped back to the plant.
The water is then reused to make more steam.
The SAGD process clearly does not disturb the land
in the same way that open pit mining does.
But because so much natural gas is burned to create the steam that is needed,
the SAGD process releases nearly twice as many greenhouse gases
as open pit mining does.
Millions of dollars are being spent to find ways to bring those emissions down,
says ConocoPhillips vice president Perry Berkenpas.
Within the next number of years, technology will unlock more ability to close that gap
and to perhaps even improve it beyond what is done in the rest of the industry.
So, understand that we're going to get there.
We know we need to get there.
But Dyer, who deplores the additional greenhouse gas emissions,
thinks all the investment being poured into Alberta's oil fields
is going in the wrong direction.
By locking into this infrastructure there, you know,
the billions in capital that are being invested in pipelines and refineries
to move this stuff to the U.S.,
we're basically prolonging the tough decision,
which is that we need to make the transition to a sustainable energy future.
Canadian officials say they will not release their detailed climate change plans,
including emission caps on oil sands,
until it is known what the U.S. plans to present at the climate treaty talks next month.
President Obama acknowledged this weekend
that the upcoming Copenhagen summit
will not result in a binding deal on reducing emissions.
Instead, it will lay out general goals for an international treaty.