Canada’s oil sands

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Whatever does or doesn’t come out of Copenhagen, one tough issue that’s not going away any time soon is the controversy over the development of Canada’s oil sands. Environmentalists are up in arms about the destructive impacts of extracting and refining the bitumen that lies deep underground in northern Alberta. Canada is under fire but it’s the United States that buys much of that oil. New pipelines are under construction to bring even more of it south. The World’s Jeb Sharp reports.

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MARCO WERMAN: Whatever comes out of Copenhagen one energy issue that’s not going away any time soon is the controversy over Canada’s oil sands. The oil deposits in Northern Alberta are some of the largest in the world but extracting and refining that oil is costly and dirty. Canada is under fire for its oil production but it’s the United States that buying much of that oil and new pipelines are being built to bring even more of it south of the border. The World’s Jeb Sharp reports.

JEB SHARP: In the early 20^th century it was Canada that imported oil from the United States. Now it’s the other way around. The US gets more oil from Canada than any other country.

DENISE HAMSHER: I don’t think most people realize that we get most of our energy imports from Canada.

SHARP: That’s Denise Hamsher, director of planning at Enbridge Energy Company which builds pipelines.

HAMSHER: In fact 20% of our crude oil imports now come from Canada. We all think of the Middle East. And collectively those countries surpass that. But no individual country comes close to Canada. And that’s expected to grow.

SHARP: Hence the construction of new pipelines. Enbridge is currently building a new one called the Alberta Clipper. When it’s complete it will stretch a thousand miles from Alberta to the city of Superior, Wisconsin at the western edge of the Great Lakes. It’s quite a feat. Everything from securing the right of way to clearing the line, to digging trenches, boring holes under rivers and roads, and finally assembling the pipeline itself and dropping it below ground. Enbridge engineer Paul Eberth shows me the ropes.

PAUL EBERTH: We’re at the pipe gang right now. We have several tractors and vehicles on the right of way. The first one is a [PH] Maruca carrying propane. They’re preheating the pipe. Behind that you have a tack rig. It’s carrying a bunch of welding machines and welders. We have three welders that are working … .

SHARP: The welders’ torches are welcome in the bitter cold. The guys are puffed up in their winter layers. They barely speak as they work. If you drive along the pipeline route you see signs of the construction everywhere. Long sections of the reddish-brown pipe, flaggers, heavy machinery, hundreds of pipeline workers. Many of them have come up from down south to work on the job. Welding inspector JD Fisher is from Louisiana.

JD FISHER: We travel everywhere. Last year I was in New York and then finished up the year in Illinois. We’ve been all over. I can’t seem to work at home.

SHARP: That influx of workers has been a boon to the small college town of Bemidji, Minnesota which is on the pipeline route.

BILL BATCHELDER: That’ll be 16 dollars and 20 cents.

SHARP: Bill Batchelder owns the Bemidji Woolen Mills. He’s done a brisk trade in outdoor gear since the pipeline workers arrived last summer.

BATCHELDER: From a purely short term economic standpoint it has been a gift from heaven. Our average ticket sale is 59 dollars. With the pipeline the average sale is 250 dollars. I mean a pair of red wing boots, minus-33 merino wool underwear, balaclava face masks, leather choppers.

SHARP: That’s Minnesota speak for big leather overmitts. But not everybody loves the pipeline. At least a few in Bemidji are really unhappy about it. Business owner Charles Worms is one of them.

CHARLES WORMS: The pipelines has come through our property and against our wishes taken in our case 11 acres of property that we did not want to give up. It was all heavily wooded and we lost obviously not only the mature tress but all the undergrowth. So we’ll never see that again as long as we live. It’s affected us to the point where we’re considering relocating.

SHARP: But the strongest opposition to the pipeline is not from land owners. It’s from environmentalists.

MARTY COBENAIS: So yeah it’s just a big mess around here.

SHARP: Marty Cobenais is a member of the nearby Red Lake Tribe. He works with a group called the Indigenous Environmental Network. He’s worried about almost every aspect of the pipeline from the loss of trees, to the potential for oil spills, to the pollution from oil sands development in Canada. And he’s worried about impacts on Native people on both sides of the border.

COBENAIS: We all feel very connected to Mother Earth, what we call her. Turtle Island, North America. What this is doing is putting scars on her. We’re trained that we’re supposed to take care of our Mother Earth. And that’s what we’re trying to do right here. She’s hurting. She’s at a breaking point right now. If we don’t take care of her now we don’t know how long we’ll have her anymore.

SHARP: The Canadian journalist, Andrew Nikiforuk, has written a whole book about the problems associated with oil development in Northern Alberta. It’s called Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. The word tar refers to a substance called bitumen which is the source of the oil. Nikiforuk says you can mine some of it but the really deep stuff has to be steamed out of the ground.

ANDREW NIKIFORUK: You’re taking enormous amounts of ground water and then using enormous amounts of natural gas to boil up that water, create steam, inject in the ground to very, very deep depths, and then you melt the bitumen like a block of wax. And then you collect the bitumen as it’s melting and bring it back up to surface. Incredibly energy intensive process. So this is a hydro carbon that comes with a much greater water footprint, carbon footprint, energy footprint, environmental footprint. Much higher than like conventional crude.

SHARP: Activists who want to stop oil sands development had hoped to slow its progress by blocking new pipelines like the Alberta Clipper. But so far at least their fight seems like too little too late. The Obama Administration approved the necessary permit for the pipeline to cross the border back in August. There’s a lawsuit challenging that permit but meanwhile the pipeline is well on schedule for completion. Susan Casey-Lefkowitz is with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.

SUSAN CASEY-LEFKOWITZ: The Alberta Clipper was the second of the new tar sands oil pipelines to be permitted from Canada into the United States. And then there’s a third pipeline that is going through its environmental impact assessment right now. And so what we see is that the Alberta Clipper is really part of a trend of the US building the infrastructure to expand its dependence on fossil fuels and on sort of the very worst of the fossil fuels you could say.

SHARP: Casey-Lefkowitz says that’s exactly the wrong way to go at a time when the United States is ostensibly committing to clean energy. But Denise Hamsher of Enbridge Energy argues that pipelines don’t create demand. The demand is already there.

HAMSHER: The last time you climbed on a plane out of the Minneapolis hub or Chicago hub or heated a home in this area or drove a diesel truck, particularly in the Midwest, that transport was fueled by crude oil that originated from Alberta’s oil sands. Today that won’t be replaced by wind mills. It can’t be. We aren’t driving cars and flying jets by windmills or solar energy yet.

SHARP: Hamsher and others argue that Canadian oil represents a reliable source of energy from a friendly country at a time when US national security concerns and energy independence are paramount. But back in Bemidji that’s not how environmental activist Marty Cobenais sees it. He thinks the political and environmental costs of that oil are too high.

HAMSHER: We have to fight the fight and you have to you know you have to try and find out other alternatives. You can’t sit and keep destroying everything all the time.

SHARP: It was bitterly cold the Marty Cobenais showed me around town. The temperature never rose above zero degrees Fahrenheit. It’s the kind of place where you let your car warm a while before you get into it. The harsh winter conditions only seem to underscore our dependence on fossil fuels and the energy dilemmas we face as a result. For The World I’m Jeb Sharp, Bemidji, Minnesota.

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