Canada's tar sands may be just too dirty

by Bob Holmes

Capturing and storing some of the carbon that would be released in the processing of Canada's tar sands may not clean the industry up. To turn the vast but dirty resource into useable oil, Canada will have to spew vast amounts of greenhouse gases.
That's the conclusion of a new study on the potential of so-called carbon capture and storage technology to reduce carbon emissions from tar sands operations.

The Athabasca tar sands of north-eastern Alberta, Canada, hold more than 170 bn barrels of recoverable oil, second only to Saudi Arabia's reserves. However, the oil is in the form of tarry bitumen that requires a great deal of energy to extract and turn into usable oil -- some three to five times as much as conventional crude. The greenhouse gases released during the processing of tar sands make it an environmentally disastrous proposition.
No wonder, then, that the government of Alberta is putting much emphasis, and billions of research and development dollars, into carbon-capture technologies that aim to remove carbon dioxide released by the tar sands industry and store it safely underground.

But a new analysis (PDF) by a UK consumer cooperative and the UK branch of environmental group WWF suggests that carbon capture will be too little, too late. Using the oil industry's own best-case estimate -- that 30 % of carbon emissions could be captured by 2030 and 50 % by 2050 -- the analysts note that this falls far short of the reduction needed to make tar sands oil compare favourably with conventional crude.
But carbon-capture technology is still experimental, retorts Jerry Bellikka, a spokesman for the Alberta government's energy department.
"To do a paper analysis and suggest that it can't work is a great hypothetical exercise," he says. "We're trying to do the practical application and [get] results."