Canada’s Highway to Hell
This article is several years old but it tells the important story of the development of the Alberta Tar Sands
The majority of the tar sands, however, can’t be dug up like Appalachian mountaintops. About 80 percent of the reserves lie so deep under the forest that they must be steamed or melted out of the ground with the help of a bewildering array of pumps, pipes, and wells. Engineers call the process in situ (in place) thermal, and it burns up nearly twice as much natural gas as the open-pit mines. The Canadian government recently estimated that it might take 20 nuclear reactors to replace natural gas as a fuel source in tar-sands operations by 2015, and companies are already putting forth proposals to build them.
…
Like most environmental indicators in the tar sands, the river is ailing. Since the 1970s the total summer flow downstream of Fort McMurray has declined by nearly a third. Yet every year the tar-sands operations withdraw 250,000 Olympic-size pools of water from the Athabasca. That’s enough water to service a city of two million people. (On average, it takes three barrels of fresh, potable water to make one barrel of oil from the sands.) One company alone, Syncrude, uses enough water each year — 2.5 trillion gallons — to supply the needs of a third of the residents of Denver.
…
Fred MacDonald, a 72-year-old descendant of Scottish and Cree fur traders, used to hunt duck and moose on Tar Island as a kid. He now lives in a bungalow overlooking the Athabasca River in Fort McKay, an Indian community pretty much surrounded by open-pit mines. Sitting in his kitchen drinking a glass of rat-root juice, an old aboriginal remedy made from a plant favored by muskrats (“It’s good for everything”), MacDonald told me how he loved that island. He recalled the days when Syrian fur traders on the Athabasca exchanged pots and pans for muskrat and beaver pelts. Back in the 1920s and 1930s aboriginal families lived all along the river and frequently enjoyed feasts of rabbit and moose meat. They netted jack fish and pickerel all winter long. “Everyone walked or paddled and the people were healthy.” Now, he said, very few people bother to travel the river much. “There is nothing in the river. It is polluted. You could dip your cup and have a nice cold drink from that river, and now you can’t.”
MacDonald, like many aboriginal elders, fears the tar sands are draining the surrounding forest of its life-sustaining fens and bogs. “It’s our future source of water and it’s drying.” And he, like Schindler, can see the impact of climate change every season. Rising winter temperatures, he said, have transformed the once clear ice of the Athabasca into slush.
