The Price of Energy Consumption - The Renaissance of Renewable Energy - page 196

Figure 6.6. The Trans-Alaska oil pipeline with a moose in the foreground. Because
pipelines may block the migration routes of animals, many are now elevated. Source : AK
Smith at Wikimedia Commons.
The melting of arctic ice, largely the result of man-made global warming, has opened
up the prospect of drilling for oil and gas in the polar regions of Alaska, Canada and
Russia. The challenges of ensuring safety in such harsh conditions are numerous: drilling
is limited to a few months per year; pack ice and icebergs complicate or prevent shipping;
oil behaves differently at low temperatures; and the logistics of any cleanup operation
become far more complex. A report commissioned by the U.S. government following the
Deepwater Horizon accident warned that “many of the challenges emerging in Arctic oil
and gas development decision making are beyond the ability of science alone to resolve”
(Holland-Bartels and Pierce 2011 , 4).
6.3 Unconventional Sources of Conventional Pollution
In recent years, estimates of the world's reserves of oil and gas have been revised upward,
mainly because ofthe inclusion ofunconventional or'tight' resources such as tar sands and
shale gas ( Chapter 2 ). The pollution from the extraction and processing of tar sands is a
matter of growing concern (Timoney and Lee 2009 ) . This is by far the most invasive form
of oil extraction. The boreal forest and underlying peat are first scraped away to expose the