Re: OIL AGAIN!
Here is an interesting article about the oil sands in Alberta Canada (goes of track abit, but makes some good points throughout). From an economic point of view, it looks like the environmental costs (i.e. significant quantities of land clearing, water use and high levels of carbon emissions) required in extracting the heavy oil will far outweigh the benefits. I think this is going too far to get at oil and looks like a very dirty industry. But everyone to there own.
Here is an interesting article about the oil sands in Alberta Canada. From an economic point of view, it looks like the environmental costs (i.e. significant quantities of land clearing, water use and high levels of carbon emissions) required in extracting the heavy oil far outweigh the benefits. I think this is going too far to get at oil and looks like a very dirty industry. No-one that even slightly places some value on the environment would accept this as a real possibility. But everyone to there own.
Canada's oil: black gold with a black heart
Date: November 11 2007 (SMH)
by Aida Edemariam
You've only got to stroll down Hardin Street to the main drag, then hang a left and walk a couple more short blocks, to see what Fort McMurray is about. It wouldn't be the whole story, but you would catch the drift.
You'd pass the Boomtown Casino, strip malls, and a club called Cowboys proudly advertising "naughty schoolgirl nights". Then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police station, the municipal offices, the Oil Sands Hotel and Diggers bar, with its advertisement for exotic dancers.
You would be passed by Humvees and countless pick-up trucks, each more souped up than the next, many covered in dried mud, many carrying further four-wheel-drives - in winter, snowmobiles; in summer, all-terrain vehicles on which to go chasing through the bush, which is visible from the main street. And if the wind is from the north-west, you can smell oil on the air: heavy, slightly sour, unmistakable. Around here, they call it the smell of money.
As the Middle East has become more unstable and as Iraq has boiled into chaos, other, unexpected places have flourished, and none more so than Fort McMurray. Five hours' drive north of Edmonton, in Alberta, it has always been a frontier town, and even before the first white explorers came fur-trapping, the Indians knew that this place sat on oil - they used it to waterproof their canoes.
The trouble has always been that it's not conventional crude, easily liberated from the earth, but tar sands (also known as oil sands) - a mixture of sand, water and heavy crude that is much more difficult and expensive to extract. It can cost about $C26 ($30) a barrel to extract - so when that was comparable to the price of oil, there was no point in trying; but now that oil is close to breaking the $US100-a-barrel barrier ($108), there definitely is.
For years there were only two outfits mining the Athabasca Oil Sands, which occupies 141,000 square kilometres; now there are seven, including Shell. In total, 1.2million barrels are extracted each day from these sands, a number projected to rise to 3.5million. Eventually, Shell alone intends to extract 500,000 barrels a day.
The companies intend to invest $C100billion in the area in the next 15 years. If oil prices stay as they are, or rise, they're playing for possible profits of tens of billions of dollars a year - much of which will come from America, gleeful at this sudden access to so much "safe" oil right next door.
Current technology means companies can reach only about 10 per cent of deposits, but even that makes the Athabasca Oil Sands the second largest proven oil reserve in the world. Add in the so-far-unreachable 90 per cent, and Alberta's oil reserves would be at least six times the size of Saudi Arabia's. Already, Canada produces as much oil as Kuwait. Small wonder Canada is increasingly described as the world's next energy superpower.
Ask almost anyone why they're in Fort McMurray and the answer is the same. A quick rub of forefingers and thumb, a knowing look. Or, in the words of irrepressible 11-year-old Ron Mfoafo-M'Carthy, here with his sister and mother to visit his father, a Ghanaian engineer: "Cha-ching!"
Projects are going up so fast that there is a huge shortage of skilled labour, and the companies are paying way over the odds to get it. An engineer such as Johnny Mfoafo-M'Carthy can make up to $C220,000 a year here, compared with $C90,000 in Toronto. You only need a high-school education and a six-month certificate to qualify for a $C100,000-a-year job driving heavy equipment. One cocky 26-year-old I meet claims he sometimes earns $C1000 a day driving a truck.
That explains why people come from across the world, to a town whose weather can be, even by Canadian standards, brutal. In winter, temperatures fall below -40 for weeks.
Fort McMurray's population - average age 31, average family income $C135,000 (the highest in Canada; the national average is $C67,600) - includes representatives from more than 70 nations including Fijians and refugees from the wild Somali-Ethiopian borderlands.
In my first 24 hours in Fort McMurray, every conversation I overhear involves cash. Hourly rates; possible hourly rates; hourly rates the other guy is getting.
It is possible to have a very good life in Fort McMurray. You can treble your salary, buy two homes, dig a swimming pool, pay off your mortgages 20 years earlier than anyone else and retire.
You can go skiing, fishing, hunting and trapping in the vast outdoors you can see from any one of the sprawling new suburbs going up as fast as contractors can build them.
Just as the California gold rush came to define the American dream, so Fort McMurray defines a particular kind of Canadian dream: go west; Fort McMurray can change your life. But first, perhaps, consider what price you are willing to pay.
Apart from the smell, you get little sense of what the oil sands are like unless you drive 45 minutes up Highway 63 and take a site tour of, say, Syncrude, the world's largest producer of synthetic crude.
After the forest is cleared and the peat bog removed, what's left is dark, molasses-like, oil-saturated sand, which is transported by trucks with tyres as high as two-storey houses.
Mining this way is hard, boring, ugly work. In winter there can be so much steam that bulldozer drivers have to inch around, hoping not to topple into tar pits. In summer the dust has to be sprayed down.
The extraction of the oil requires heat, and thus the burning of vast amounts of natural gas. Some estimate that Fort McMurray and the Athabasca Oil Sands will soon be Canada's biggest contributor to global warming.
The oil sands excavations are changing the surface of the planet. The black mines can now be seen from space. Acid rain is already killing trees and damaging foliage. The oil companies counter that they are replanting grass for bison and 4.5 million trees by Syncrude alone.
Two barrels of water are required to extract one barrel of oil; every day as much water is taken from the Athabasca river as would serve a city of a million people. Although the water is extensively recycled, it cannot be returned to the rivers, so it ends up in man-made "tailings ponds" (tailings is a catch-all term for the by-products of mining), which are also visible from space.
Leigh Wild drives a bulldozer for Syncrude. It's a good job and she is grateful for it, but there are things that trouble her. The sandhill cranes, for example.
"When I'm at the end of a night shift, at dawn, or when the sun goes down, I see them walking out through the discharge from the coke line, eating insects. I try to scare them away, because it's so sad to see them in such a place. Almost heartbreaking."
Mayor Melissa Blake has the unenviable job of running a town that is buckling under the demands of a population that has doubled in the past 10 years from 32,000 to about 65,000. It is projected to grow by another 40,000 in the next five years. A new sewage treatment plant, begun before a credit agreement was even in place, will be finished in 2009 - and will be too small a year later. A school that took three years to build was too small a year before it opened.
This is an overwhelmingly male place: lots of cash, lots of men. A few come with partners; many do not. The persistent urban myth is that this is the divorce capital of Canada. There are no figures, but plenty of stories of women arriving to surprise husbands on anniversaries, only to find the marriage defunct; of one or both working such long hours that the marriage collapses out of sheer disuse; or the children spin out of control.
"Family life takes a beating here - big time," says Dave Drummond, president of the Communications Union. At the Lion's Den, a dark, dingy boozer full of tired men downing Labatt Blues, Kim Pabrelko, 21, says women are always having to defend themselves.
"That's a big reason why I like working behind the bar," she says. But she is sympathetic, too. She sees a lot of loneliness. "Eighty per cent have families back home."
The town is up in arms about a recent article in the Canadian magazine Chatelaine that noted that escorts make more here than anywhere in Canada, and described a dating atmosphere of rampant mistrust and betrayal. You can see why people are insulted, but it's not hard to understand how the piece came to be: there are 11 pages of escorts in the Yellow Pages (annotated, in my hotel room), and the subject often comes up with little prodding.
Men complain that women just want them for their money but, as one woman said tartly, if they will go out at night wearing a Syncrude badge (guaranteed $C100,000 a year), what do they expect? In their defence, it's a way of standing out from the crowd; it probably also provides a kind of armour, though not against gold-digging.