Eco stuff. ENG. ENG. ENG. The Dirty Truth About Tar Sands Oil Extraction. We now know that contrary to what Big Oil and its politicians would have you believe, the Keystone XL pipeline would put hundreds of American communities and the nation’s largest freshwater aquifer at risk from oil spill contamination. A recent report also revealed that TransCanada, the company pushing to build the Keystone XL, grossly misrepresented the number of temporary jobs the pipeline would create. But what about the immense damage caused by the extraction of the tar sands oil before it makes its way into the pipeline? Tar sands take 3 barrels of water to process every barrel of oil extracted. Ninety percent of this water becomes so toxic that it must be stored in tailing ponds.
Unfortunately these ponds regularly leach pollution into the third largest watershed in the world. Learn more from the video below: Related Reading: Julia Louis-Dreyfus Says Keystone XL Is “Mega-Stupid” Robert Redford Endorses Nov. 6 Tar Sands Action [Video] Image via TarSandsAction.org. Canada's tar sands: Muck and brass. SMOKESTACKS dot the horizon; a whiff of oil hangs in the air; gargantuan vehicles clog the highway. There is a din of heavy machinery, punctuated by blasts from cannons scaring birds away from toxic lakes.
But golf courses and suburban housing make the place liveable, and some locals have grown attached to Alberta's tar sands and Fort McMurray, the town at the centre of them. “I'd like my son and grandson to work here,” says a worker at one of Shell's mines. He may get his wish. After a brief hiatus during the economic downturn, world oil consumption is rising again, pushing the price of a barrel towards $100. By 2035, believes the International Energy Agency (IEA), demand may reach 110m barrels per day (b/d), about 20% more than in 2009. Despite rapid development in the past decade, the sands produce only 1.5m b/d, less than 2% of global supply. There are obstacles too, mainly because of the sheer dirtiness of the business. First, the economics. A bitumen bottleneck Clean and scrub. Canada's PR work for tar sands: dirty, crude and oily | Martin Lukacs.
Another climate-related record will soon be broken, but it's not like those you've been hearing about: the heat waves, droughts and torrential floods setting calamitous precedents everywhere. For a change, mark down this next one as a sign of hope. It's that Washington will play host to the largest act of civil disobedience for the climate in US history. From 20 August to 3 September, a wildly diverse range of protesters – Nebraskan ranchers and teachers from Wisconsin, Texan landowners and indigenous leaders in Canada, some of the country's top scientists and a few celebrities – will descend on the White House for a series of enormous sit-ins. Their demand: that President Obama deny a permit for a pipeline that would further hook the United States to the Albertan tar sands, the world's dirtiest oil.
TransCanada's 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline will carry as many as 1.1m barrels of crude a day to the Gulf of Mexico. It will cut through the sensitive heartland of the country.