So. Canadian mining practices are really shitty Part 1: THE TAR SANDS

[the_future_modernes]

The Tar Sands Note ( the amt of oil we get from the damn things fluctuates in eacch story from about 10% - 23%. They are still our largest exporters though.)

America and Canada

Tar Sands & Water (Part 1 of 5)

Interviews with mostly members of the Fort MacKay and Fort Chipewyan communities, discussing cultural and environmental impacts of living downstream of the tar sands (allegedly causing cancers in these villages) plants

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5


What does the tar sands look like?


July 2010Kalamazoo Spill Underscores Dangers of Proposed Tar Sands Oil Pipeline from Canada to Gulf Coast

As Obama administration weighs approval of Keystone XL pipeline, massive oil spill threatens Lake Michigan

Washington, D.C. -- This week, a pipeline carrying oil from Canada into the U.S. ruptured, spilling more than a million gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. Crews are attempting to prevent the spilled oil from reaching Lake Michigan, where it could cause catastrophic environmental damage.

Before this week’s oil spill, federal officials criticized Enbridge, the Canadian tar sands oil giant that owns the pipeline, for ignoring corrosion that compromised the pipeline’s integrity.

TransCanada, another major Canadian tar sands oil company, is currently seeking Obama administration approval for its proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, which would travel 1,700 miles from Canada to refineries near Houston. The company is also seeking a safety waiver that would allow it to use thinner-than-normal steel and pump oil at a higher-than-normal pressure.

Alex Moore, dirty fuels campaigner at Friends of the Earth, had the following statement regarding this week’s events:

“This disastrous oil spill in Michigan is yet another wake-up call to the tragic impacts of our oil dependence. Coming on the heels of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, this spill reinforces the need for us to build a clean energy economy, not more pipelines.

“Enbridge and other oil companies like BP have deliberately cut corners on safety without respect for the people or communities they put at risk. President Obama should take a long, hard look at this disaster and deny a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, the next on Big Oil’s wish list.”

For months, ranchers, environmentalists, and public health advocates have challenged TransCanada’s plans to build another pipeline to carry the world’s dirtiest oil from Canada’s tar sands into the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency recently handed the State Department’s draft analysis of the proposed pipeline’s environmental impacts a failing grade, in part because it failed to address the dangers the pipeline would pose to communities along its path.MORE

Energy Is Ugly: Tar Sands Edition


blockquote>...Canada is the leading oil-supplier of the United States. Let me repeat that: the US imports more oil from Canada than (yes) Mexico, which ranks second, and (believe it or not) Saudi Arabia, which ranks only third. Tar sands are largely responsible for Canada's new petro-status. Nearly a million barrels of tar sands oil arrive in the US every day. By 2025, Canada is expected to beproducing 3.5 million barrels of tar sands oil daily. Most of that, says Ryan Salmon of the National Wildlife Federation, will be imported to the US And believe me, when it comes to energy ugly, tar sands could take the cake.

...

At the time of the Kalamazoo spill, Enbridge's CEO, Patrick Daniels, claimed that there had never been a leak "of this consequence" in the company's history. According to Enbridge's own reports, however, between 2000 and 2009 the company was responsible for 610 pipeline spills in Canada, totaling 5.5 million gallons. (Not all were DilBit, which makes the picture worse, not better, since ordinary crude is less corrosive and volatile than DilBit.) In Michigan, 12 spills from Enbridge's pipelines preceded the larger one in the Kalamazoo. Two months after that spill, another part of Enbridge's Lakehead pipeline leaked 256,000 gallons of DilBit into Romeoville, a suburb of Chicago.

Keystone's underground pipeline to the Gulf Coast, which opened only nine months ago, has already leaked seven times. They have been small leaks, but significant nonetheless as they point to larger, more distressing problems. "It seems odd to us that a brand-new pipeline would have these little spills throughout," says Casey-Lefkowitz. "It raises questions about the quality of construction."

"TransCanada is building its pipelines according to strength regulations designed for conventional pipelines decades ago," adds Anthony Swift, co-author of the NRDC report. Swift says the company "has not yet provided a meaningful strategy for dealing with some of the characteristics of diluted bitumen."

The proposed Keystone XL, also underground, would carry up to 900,000 barrels of DilBit (37,800,000 gallons) south every day, passing through some of the most sensitive ecosystems in the US, including rivers, wildlife preserves, and wide expanses of prairie. In addition, it would run through the Ogallala aquifer, a 174,000-square-mile expanse of water that lies under eight states from the Dakotas to Texas and provides 30% of the nation's irrigation for agriculture, as well as drinking water for 82% of the people within its vast boundaries.

The pipeline would pass through areas where landslides and earthquakes are known threats. Part of Keystone I already traverses an area of seismic activity in Nebraska, where a recent tremor—3.5 on the Richter scale—shook the ground throughout the southeast part of the state. It also runs through the easternmost part of the Ogallala. Before Keystone I was built, a National Wildlife Federation report warned, "Some portions of the aquifer are so close to the surface that any pipeline leak would almost immediately contaminate a large portion of the water."

MORE

Indigenous News Network: Canadian Tar Sands Resistance

Indigenous peoples (known as First Nations) in Canada are taking the lead to stop the largest industrial project on Mother Earth: the Tar Sands Gigaproject. Northern Alberta is ground zero with over 20 corporations operating in the tar sands sacrifice zone, with expanded developments being planned. The cultural heritage, land, ecosystems and human health of First Nation communities including the Mikisew Cree First Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Fort McMurray First Nation, Fort McKay Cree Nation, Beaver Lake Cree First Nation Chipewyan Prairie First Nation, and the Metis, are being sacrificed for oil money in what has been termed a “slow industrial genocide”. Infrastructure projects linked to the tar sands expansion such as the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline, threaten First Nation communities in British Columbia, Canada and American Indian communities throughout the United States. Community resistance is growing and Indigenous peoples throughout North America have mounted substantive challenges to tar sands expansion.

Just a few years ago, people in Canada, U.S. and Europe heard little to nothing about the Canadian tar sands. Today, the tar sands have become a topic of national and international discussion as stories of cancer epidemics in the community of Fort Chipewyan, massive wildlife losses related to toxic contamination, environmental degradation and increased vocal resistance from impacted communities have shattered the ‘everything is fine’ myth propagated by the Canadian and Alberta governments. A poll conducted in 2010 found that 50% of Canadian citizens believe the risks involved with tar sands projects outweighed the benefits.1 Yet, tar sands expansion continues. Already the Athabasca delta has been completely altered from a pristine boreal forest, clean rivers and lakes to a devastated ecosystem of deforestation, open pit mines and watershed where fish regularly exhibit tumors and birds landing on contaminated tailings ponds die instantly.
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Canadian Tar Sands: Impacts to US and Canadian Indigenous Communites

In Northern Alberta, laying beneath 10.6 MILLION ACRES (4.3 million hectares), an area the size of Florida, are tar sands that are a mixture of sand, clay, and a heavy crude oil or tarry substance called bitumen.

To get this substance out of the ground - process the bitumen into heavy crude oil the industry strips all the trees, plants, and critical habitat called "over-burden" or an 'in-situ" or at the site/in place extraction method.

To process the extracted bitumen in upgraders to synthetic crude oil that is then piped to the U.S. for refining. These upgrade facilities require large areas that are more like cities, with smoke stacks bellowing pollutants into the air and the wastewater from the process are emptied and stored in huge toxic tailings ponds that can be seen from space.

For each barrel of oil produced from the tar sands takes from 110 to 350 gallons of water (or 2 to 6 barrels) of water.MORE

Scraping Bottom: The Canadian Oil Boom

...The Alberta government asserts that the river is not being contaminated—that anything found in the river or in its delta, at Lake Athabasca, comes from natural bitumen seeps. The river cuts right through the oil sands downstream of the mines, and as our chopper zoomed along a few feet above it, McEachern pointed out several places where the riverbank was black and the water oily. "There is an increase in a lot of metals as you move downstream," he said. "That's natural—it's weathering of the geology. There's mercury in the fish up at Lake Athabasca—we've had an advisory there since the 1990s. There are PAHs in the sediments in the delta. They're there because the river has eroded through the oil sands."

Independent scientists, to say nothing of people who live downstream of the mines in the First Nations' community of Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabasca, are skeptical. "It's inconceivable that you could move that much tar and have no effect," says Peter Hodson, a fish toxicologist at Queen's University in Ontario. An Environment Canada study did in fact show an effect on fish in the Steepbank River, which flows past a Suncor mine into the Athabasca. Fish near the mine, Gerald Tetreault and his colleagues found when they caught some in 1999 and 2000, showed five times more activity of a liver enzyme that breaks down toxins—a widely used measure of exposure to pollutants—as did fish near a natural bitumen seep on the Steepbank.

"The thing that angers me," says David Schindler, "is that there's been no concerted effort to find out where the truth lies."

Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, was talking about whether people in Fort Chipewyan have already been killed by pollution from the oil sands. In 2006 John O'Connor, a family physician who flew in weekly to treat patients at the health clinic in Fort Chip, told a radio interviewer that he had in recent years seen five cases of cholangiocarcinoma—a cancer of the bile duct that normally strikes one in 100,000 people. Fort Chip has a population of around 1,000; statistically it was unlikely to have even one case. O'Connor hadn't managed to interest health authorities in the cancer cluster, but the radio interview drew wide attention to the story. "Suddenly it was everywhere," he says. "It just exploded."
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TAR SANDS: Indigenous take on BP and Royal Bank of Scotland

TAR SANDS TOUR UK: Indigenous take on BP and Royal Bank of Scotland

April 12-20, 2011 IEN UK Tar Sands Speakers Tour!

By Indigenous Environmental Network
Photo by Allan Lissner

IEN is excited to announce a full schedule of events during the 2011 UK Tar Sands Tour! IEN is sponsoring two front line community activists who are confronting Tar Sands along with a member of our IEN tar sands team. For 11 days they will be traveling across the UK to confront BP and Royal Bank of Scotland and be making friends along the way. Look below for more details and also check out our web site for updates!
http://www.ienearth.org/tarsands.html
or check out our UK partners site:
See http://www.no-tar-sands.org/tar-sands-tour-2011/
for further details and updates.
Delegation bio's:MORE

Obama cites 'destructive' Canadian oilsands, hints at withholding approval of Keystone pipeline

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Wednesday said concerns in the United States about the potentially "destructive" nature of the Canadian oilsands need to be answered before his administration decides whether to approve the construction of Calgary-based TransCanada's controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

Speaking publicly for the first time about the Keystone XL project, Obama referred to Alberta's bitumen deposits as "tarsands" — the term favoured by environmentalists — but refused to offer an opinion about whether the 3,200-kilometre pipeline should be approved.
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Wyden Seeks FTC Probe of Canadian Oil Cos.: Pipeline to Gulf of Mexico Refiners Would Bypass Midwest

WASHINGTON -- In an effort to protect U.S. consumers from Canadian oil companies using potentially anti-competitive practices to drive up prices for tar sands oil at Midwest refineries, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) called Wednesday for a Federal Trade Commission investigation into whether seven Canadian oil companies illegally colluded to control the price of oil to U.S. refineries that contribute to the nation’s supply of gasoline and diesel fuel.
In a letter to FTC Chairman Jonathan Leibowitz, Wyden called on the commission to investigate confidential agreements between seven Canadian oil companies planning to construct a pipeline from Canadian tar sands oil deposits to refineries in along the Gulf of Mexico, bypassing refineries in the Midwest.

Should the pipeline be built, the result will drive up prices at those Midwest refineries and the cost will be transferred to gasoline consumersMORE

Canadian Tar Sands Company Found Guilty in Deaths of Over 1,600 Waterfowl Sets International Example in Prosecuting Bird Deaths Due to Industry Negligence

(Washington, D.C., July 15, 2010) A Canadian judge has found Syncrude Canada, Ltd. guilty in the deaths of over 1,600 waterfoul that landed in the tar sands company’s Aurura Mine toxic tailings ponds in Alberta on April 28, 2008.

At the conclusion of the nine-week trial, Alberta Provincial Judge Ken Tjosvold determined that Syncrude, which is Canada’s largest tar sands oil producer, did not have adequate bird deterrents in place and was therefore in violation of the Alberta Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act. The company was also found to be in violation of the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act for depositing a harmful substance in places frequented by migratory birds. This Act is the Canadian counterpart to the U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty Act, both of which resulted from an international treaty between the two countries, and which makes it illegal to kill a migratory bird – even if unintentionally – without a permit.

“In prosecuting Syncrude under the Migratory Birds Convention Act, the Canadian government has sent a clear message that reaches beyond the scope of this one case and beyond the country’s borders; namely the unregulated killing of migratory birds by industry is not to be accepted,” said American Bird Conservancy President George Fenwick. “The United States would do well to follow Canada’s leading example in situations where mass mortality of migratory birds results from industry actions. Financial penalties should be used to help repair habitat and undertake other critical actions to help birds affected by such incidents. Particularly egregious examples can be found in the case of ongoing bird deaths at wind farms, and in the deaths of pelicans, boobies, and other birds that have resulted from the Gulf Coast oil spill.”MORE

EU

EXCLUSIVE-Canada warns EU of trade conflict over oil sands

* Leaked letter warns EU over planned environmental laws

* Letter: EU fuel law discriminates against Canada's oil

* Letter: EU's fuel quality laws at odds with "freer trade"

By Pete Harrison

BRUSSELS, April 4 (Reuters) - The Canadian government has stepped up lobbying in Europe for its highly-polluting tar sands industry, repeating its threats of trade conflict, a leaked letter shows.

The letter dated March 18 to Europe's commissioners for climate, trade and energy follows Canada's denial it threatened to scrap a free trade deal unless the European Union alters planned environmental laws.

"Given the desire for freer trade between us, it is important that our individual efforts to address climate change do not lead to the creation of unnecessary barriers," Canadian trade official Mark Richardson said in a document sent with the letter.

"The Government of Canada believes this approach raises the prospect of unjustified discrimination and is not supported by the science."MORE

NORWAY
Alta. Statoil case watched in Norway

Activists say environmental charges against Norwegian energy giant Statoil related to its Alberta oilsands mine are being closely monitored in the multinational's home country.

Statoil made its first appearance on the 19 charges Wednesday in an Edmonton courtroom, where they were put over until June 30 — an unusually long adjournment to allow lawyers to come to grips with extensive documentation in the case, said Crown prosecutor Susan McRory.

"It's a massive amount of disclosure," she said outside court. "These files are big."

Statoil faces 16 charges of improperly diverting water at its oilsands project in 2008 and 2009 and another three of providing false or misleading statements.

Representatives of several Norwegian environmental organizations were in court Wednesday. Martin Norman of Greenpeace Norway said interest in the Scandinavian country is higha href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2011/04/06/edmonton-statoil-court.html">MORE