MONTREAL - The era of oil gushing from ground wells is over and can only be replaced by costly and complex refining of deposits such as Canada's oil sands to satisfy rising global energy needs, said a senior oil executive.
Pressed about the high cost of oil sands extraction and attacks by environmentalists worried about its contribution to global warming, Jean-Michel Gires, president of French-based Total's Canadian subsidiary, told AFP he is optimistic specifically about the future of Canada's oil sands development.
A giant mechanical digger gouges out a chunk of topsoil, grass and
tree stumps, extending a neat furrow that stretches into the distance.
Dozens of similar furrows run parallel with the regularity of a
ploughed field.
Yet no crop could grow in the pitch-black surface exposed by the
machine working 1,000ft below our helicopter. This is the edge of a
fast-expanding open-cast mine in the Canadian tar sands, one of the
world's most polluting sources of oil.
EDMONTON - Last week 30 activists scaled a security fence at France's largest oil refinery, near La Havre. Inside, they clambered up towers and unfurled banners. Their message, roughly translated, was this: Get out of the oilsands; Get out of Alberta.
The refinery's owner, Total S.A., has been considering a multibillion-dollar expansion of their oilsands holdings. The CEO of the company's Canadian division said this week a decision would come within months.
A fuming Premier Ed Stelmach has vowed to punish Greenpeace activists to the full extent of the law after protesters invaded their third Alberta oilsands site in as many weeks on Saturday.
The group, an international team of activists, scaled three smoke stacks and one crane at the Shell Scotford upgrader near Fort Saskatchewan, just northeast of Edmonton -- part of a continuing bid
by the group to grab headlines ahead of global climate talks in Copenhagen in December.
VANCOUVER - Alberta's oil sands are emitting more greenhouse gas emissions than previously known by not calculating the impact of using forest and peatlands for production, according to a new report commissioned partly by Greenpeace.
The research conducted by Global Forest Watch found that industry and the government are underestimating how much greenhouse gas emissions are coming from oil sand production by nearly a quarter. Official estimates don't account for carbon released as forest cover is cut and peatlands disturbed, the report says.
CALGARY, Alberta - Royal Dutch Shell Plc has suspended production at its Canadian oil sands mine after environmental activists blockaded a massive dump truck and mining shovel to protest the impact of oil sands development, the company said on Tuesday.
Greenpeace said 25 of its activists locked down the oil sands mining equipment at the Albian Sands Muskeg River mine in northern Alberta on Tuesday morning, a day before Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper meets U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington.
MONTREAL - A new report from Greenpeace says oil production in Alberta's tar sands has made Canada into a "global carbon bully."
Little has been done to tackle climate change in Canada, and the federal government has actively tried to block international agreements and laws targeting climate change, says the report, called Dirty Oil: How The Tar Sands Are Fuelling the Global Climate Crisis.
Less than two weeks after the State Department gave the go-ahead for
a major new 36-inch diameter pipeline to carry Alberta oil sands crude
into the United States, a network of environmental and Native American
groups filed a lawsuit
in a San Francisco court on Thursday, accusing President Barack Obama's
administration of significantly accelerating the importation of "dirty
oil" from Alberta.
The government is busy stemming the flow of immigration from Mexico,
but it's welcoming a different kind of flood from the north. The State
Department just approved a project to pipe some of the world's dirtiest
oil from Canada into America's fuel-hungry economy.
The world is heading for a catastrophic energy
crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of
the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a
leading energy economist has warned.
Higher oil prices brought on by a rapid increase in demand and a stagnation,
or even decline, in supply could blow any recovery off course, said Dr Fatih
Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency
(IEA) in Paris, which is charged with the task of assessing future energy
supplies by OECD countries.
