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Two Fridays ago, a bigwig from the Suncor oil company sat at Wayne Groot's kitchen table, where the window looks out over his cherished potato fields. They chatted about their kids, and Mr. Groot, not being the lawyer-fetching type, served tea.
But it wasn't long before the conversation turned to the true reason for the visit: Suncor wants to buy the Groot land – in particular, the patch upon which the family bungalow sits – to build an upgrader that will take the bitumen travelling from the oil sands up north and turn it into synthetic crude for the thirsty markets down south.
The night before the visit, Mr. Groot, 47, had a restless sleep. But then he's been suffering waking nights for two years now, ever since the land agent first showed up and slipped a big number his way for the acreage he'd always imagined passing on to his kids. He doesn't want to sell; his family has been farming the rich soil northeast of Edmonton for three generations. It pains him to think of smokestacks plopped on some of the finest agricultural fields in the country.
Greenpeace activists unveil a huge protest sign in Edmonton to coincide with the opening of a session of the Alberta legislature in November.
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But he knows that everything is headed in that direction, as relentlessly as the bitumen flowing down the pipes from Fort McMurray, where 42,000 hectares of nearby boreal forest have already been hacked so raw and bare that people say they don't like to fly over it any more.
And to think that when he was a boy, on vacation with his parents, he'd once been excited at the sight of Suncor's busy oil sands mine. Back then, Suncor was on its own, pushing out 50,000 barrels on a good day. Now, with daily production at 1.2 million barrels and growing, and 40 companies with a stake in the sands, the problem has drifted into Mr. Groot's backyard: Pending provincial approval, there are plans to build as many as 10 upgraders within a few kilometres of his farm.
“We're exploiting this province way too fast,” says Mr. Groot. “In 50 years, we will know a lot more about what this has done. But then there won't be any more land left.”
This is what angers environmentalists and an increasingly vocal segment of Albertans: The oil sands projects have grown in number and size so suddenly that there hasn't been time to consider the long-term environmental costs. Groups like the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental think tank, have proposed a moratorium on new projects until technology can catch up. Greenpeace, which opened an Edmonton office last summer, is campaigning for a complete halt to all development.
Mike Hudema, the Medicine Hat native who returned to Canada to run the Greenpeace office, says: “What is the cost of this? Right now, we are in the early stages and already it is completely out of control.”
There's no getting around it: Oil produced from the bitumen lying in the sand under Alberta's boreal forest is one of the dirtiest fuels in the world. Under current conditions, extracting one barrel of synthetic crude from a mine requires roughly two to four barrels of fresh water from the nearby Athabasca River (an amount top water scientists say the river cannot sustain), along with 750 cubic feet of non-renewable natural gas and about four tonnes of tarry sand and “overburden” – the industry term for what Mr. Groot calls soil.
Steaming it out of the ground – a process that will dominate most of the future expansion since the vast majority of bitumen is found too deep to be mined – creates a crisscross of pipes across the wilderness and requires large amounts of energy to boil the necessary water. The impact of so-called “in situ” extraction on groundwater supply and quality, environmentalists say, is uncertain.
What's more, the oil sands are easily cast as a climate-change villain: In 2006, researchers at Simon Fraser University found that the mining and upgrading of oil sands bitumen created five times as many greenhouse-gas emissions as would come from producing oil from a conventional well.
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