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Welcome to Wednesday Night #1336 Qct 10, 2007

PLEASE LET US KNOW IF YOU CAN BE WITH US - IT MAKES THE CHAIRMAN'S JOB EASIER

Wednesday Night #1336: IT’S ABOUT OIL/TAR SANDS

Monday 08 October 2007 A very imp story by Diana Nicholson with links
STUPID TO THE LAST DROP: HOW ALBERTA IS BRINGING ENVIRONMENTAL ARMAGEDDON TO CANADA (AND DOESN’T SEEM TO CARE)
Please also see Oil Notes

Run Gerald Ratzer Slides | his photo Albums

Gerald Ratzer OWN and Tony Deutsch OWN, being responsible members of the McGill Pension Fund Committee, have conducted due diligence on the Tar Sands and are back from Fort McMurray fully propagandized and ready to share their findings.
If this is our only topic (which is unlikely), it will be a fascinating Wednesday Night. Our resident Judy Geologist aka Professor Judith Patterson OWN will no doubt set matters straight in her inimitable fashion, invoking The End of Suburbia and Hubbert’s Peak.
BE PREPARED!
To add fuel to the flames of discussion you may want to pick up William Marsden’s recently published book, STUPID TO THE LAST DROP: HOW ALBERTA IS BRINGING ENVIRONMENTAL ARMAGEDDON TO CANADA (AND DOESN’T SEEM TO CARE). Failing that, read the Globe & Mail Review . The reviewer pounced on Mr. Marsden’s account of a ‘nutty’ plan hatched in the 1950s to release the oil mixed within Alberta’s gritty sand using an underground nuclear blast.
What goes around comes around and in September there were reports that “AECL and Energy Alberta have proposed building a nuclear reactor near the site of Shell’s vast Athabasca tar sands development. The boss of Energy Alberta has said the C$6 billion reactor has the backing of a large unnamed company that would take 70 per cent of the reactor’s energy.” This should please Douglas Lightfoot!
Critics of the Tar Sands abound. Consider this from World Watch/AlterNet.org
“The environmental consequences of oil production from Alberta’s tar sands are major, beginning with its effect on climate change. North America’s transition to oil from the tar sands not only perpetuates, but actually worsens, emissions of greenhouse gas pollution from oil consumption.
While the end products from conventional oil and tar sands are the same (mostly transportation fuels), producing a barrel of synthetic crude oil from the tar sands releases up to three times more greenhouse gas pollution than conventional oil. This is a result of the huge amount of energy (primarily from burning natural gas) required to generate the heat needed to extract bitumen from the tar sands and upgrade it into synthetic crude. The energy equivalent of one barrel of oil is required to produce just three barrels of oil from the tar sands.”
On the other hand, as good economists are wont to say, consider the Edmonton Sun’s piece on the hike in royalties proposed by the Alberta Royalty Review Panel which mounts an attack on the costs of clean energy technologies. The proposal caught the eye of Bloomberg
Should we tire of Alberta, there’s always the province formerly known as have-not. Newfoundland’s offshore oil is now so important it attracts attention from Economist writers, while the New York Times looks at exploration in out-of-the-way locations with climates even worse than in northern Alberta
And, if all of that leaves you feeling uninformed, consult the Wednesday Night Oil Notes
There will, of course, be other topics to cover as we survey developments around the world: Burma, China, Darfur, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan come to mind. Political events in the U.S. never cease to entertain. And for comic relief, there’s always the trail of political figures visiting Afghanistan.