Do You Know About The Alberta Oil Sands?
Alberta Oil Sands, Canada in 2007. Courtesy of Edward Burtynsky of http://www.prixpictet.com
In 2009 the Feature length documentary H2oil was released. It didn’t appear on my radar until I came across this artful animated trailer by Art Directors Dale Hayward & Sylvie Trouvé and illustrator James Braithwaite. The brief sequences cranked open a window of insight into Canada’s oil sands. If you thought America got most of it’s oil from Saudi Arabia, you’d be wrong! The behemoth natin get’s the majority of it’s oil from under Alberta’s perfect boreal forests in a process which uses almost 4 barrels of fresh water (a rare resource in itself) to produce a single barrel of crude oil. Here’s what the H2oil website factsheet has to say:
Alberta covers 149, 000 square kilometers, an area larger than Florida, and holds at least 175 billion barrels of recoverable crude bitumen. Canada has become the largest supplier of oil to the U.S., with over a million barrels per day coming from the oil sands. Currently 40% of all oil produced in Canada is derived from the oil sands. The crude oil produced from the oil sands, the dirtiest oil in the world, could keep the global appetite for oil at bay for another 50 years.
But oil sands are a fundamentally different kind of oil. They take a lot of energy and a lot of water and leave a very large environmental footprint compared to all other forms of oil extraction. Because of this, the massive changes to the boreal forest and the watershed have prompted the United Nations to list this region as a global hot spot for environmental change.
In addition, oil sands projects are major emitters of greenhouse gases. They accounted for 4% of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2005, making it impossible to meet obligations set out in Kyoto for emissions-reductions.
I have not yet seen the feature film, but I plan to as soon as possible. And the core question posed by the feature?
What is more important, oil or water? And what will be our response?
[...] H2oil animated sequences [...]
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[...] http://www.theurbn.com/2011/03/alberta-oil-sands/ [...]