Canada is in the middle of a quiet oil boom

“Locally it's completely destructive,” said David Keith, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Calgary. “Oil sands mining turns what was previously undisturbed forest into a big hole in the ground.”

Keith says the scarring of this earth is just a small part of the problem.  Extracting oil from tar sands and oil shale releases three times as much carbon dioxide as traditional oil drilling.

“As conventional oil, the stuff that's easy to pump, the stuff that's cheap, gets scarce, the industry will move to further down the food chain — the industry will move to things like oil sands, to oil shales,” he said. “And each of those things has a bigger carbon footprint than the original light oil it replaced.”

Suncor says it has cut its carbon emissions in half in the past decade, and most of the oil companies in Alberta are working on reducing their water and energy usage. But it may be too little, too late to meet Canada's global pledge.  Canada has signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for a cut in greenhouse gases by 2012.

“It's obvious we're not going to meet the Kyoto targets,” said George. “Tar sands is just one factor.”

Some critics of fossil fuels have questioned why companies like Suncor are putting so much effort into developing more oil instead of looking into alternative energy sources.  George counters that argument with a reminder that the world still depends heavily on hydrocarbons for transportation fuels. 

“If you think about the jet you flew in to get here to Calgary, if you think about transportation by car, we're going be very dependent on that for the foreseeable future,” he said.

Last month, Canada announced strict new rules requiring the oil sands industry to capture the majority of its carbon emissions.  It's a move welcomed by oil companies like Shell, which say they do need to address the climate issue if they're going to keep extracting oil far into the future.

“There’s no doubt my company shares the global concern around climate change,” said Straub. “So having taken that as a given we're working constantly on new technologies to address the CO2 issues. We believe that a lot of the conventional resources are into decline.  And that's why they require unconventional resources like ours in the oil sands."

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