Water and Power - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 249

have taken to calling it Fort McMoney because companies such as Royal Dutch Shell,
Conoco-Phillips, Chevron, Imperial Oil (mostly owned by ExxonMobil), British Petro-
leum, Total, StatoilHydro of Norway, and Suncor have poured $150 billion into process-
ing oil from the tar sands in a fifty-seven-thousand-square-mile area—a region almost
the size of Florida. These companies plan to invest an additional $75 billion in the re-
gion by 2012.
The extraction of oil from Alberta's tar sands is the world's largest energy project
and is expected to contribute nearly $1 trillion to Canada's gross domestic product by
2020. The tar sands contain more oil than the fields of Kuwait, Norway, and Russia com-
bined. If only 10 percent of Alberta's deposits are actually tapped, they still represent the
world's second-largest oil reserve, after Saudi Arabia's. By 2007, output from Alberta's
fields was topping a million barrels a day, making Canada the United States's number
one source of imported oil. By 2015, oil recovery from the tar sands is predicted to
triple. It has been estimated that the three major bitumen deposits in Alberta will even-
tually yield as much as 1.7 trillion barrels of synthetic crude.
But extracting bitumen from tar sands requires tremendous amounts of energy and
water, and the Achilles' heel of “Canada's greatest economic project,” that there might
not be enough water to sustain it, is largely overlooked.
Alberta is one of the driest parts of Canada, containing only 2.2 percent of the na-
tion's freshwater. The province lies in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains, where
many glaciers have lost a third of their mass and snowpack has been shrinking due to a
temperature rise of two to four degrees since the 1970s. Tree-ring studies show that over
the millennia the region has suffered extreme droughts that have lasted up to twenty
years.
Tar sand mining uses an average of three to four barrels of freshwater to produce
one barrel of bitumen, with the water usually being heated to help separate hydrocar-
bons from the sand and clay. Although some companies recycle their water as many
as eighteen times, the industry still takes great volumes from the Athabasca River and
nearby aquifers. Even in a drought, the government will allow the tar sand industry to
withdraw enough water to fill fifty bathtubs per second. In 2008, tar sand processing
accounted for 76 percent of the water taken from the Athabasca , Alberta's longest un-
dammed waterway. Existing licenses allow oil companies to take 3.3 billion barrels of
freshwater a year, which is enough to supply two cities the size of Calgary. Planned ex-
pansions to tar sands mining could bring the total up to 4.2 billion barrels a year . But,
cautioned Natural Resources Canada, this volume “would not be sustainable because
the Athabasca River does not have sufficient flows.”
Mining bitumen also requires vast amounts of energy and pollutes the air, ground,
and water. This has already had health and social impacts on local people. Although