Calgary booms

North America's biggest resources boom since the Klondike gold rush, according to the Financial Times of London as quoted by Naomi Klein in the following excellent article.

... In March 2003, the price of oil reached $35 a barrel, raising the prospect of making a profit from the tar sands (the industry calls them "oil sands"). That year, the United States Energy Information Administration "discovered" oil in the tar sands. It announced that Alberta–previously thought to have only five billion barrels of oil–was actually sitting on at least 174 billion "economically recoverable" barrels. The next year, Canada overtook Saudi Arabia as the leading provider of foreign oil to the United States. ...

All the majors, save BP, have rushed to northern Alberta: ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Total, which alone plans to spend $9 billion to $14 billion. In April, Shell paid $8 billion to take full control of its Canadian subsidiary. ...

Seventy-five percent of the oil from the tar sands flows directly to the United States ...

It has become fashionable to predict that high oil prices will spark a free-market response to climate change, setting off an "explosion of innovation in alternatives", as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently. Alberta puts the lie to that claim. High prices have indeed led to an R&D extravaganza, but it is squarely focused on figuring out how to get the dirtiest possible oil out of the hardest-to-reach places. Shell, for instance, is working on a "novel thermal recovery process"–embedding large electric heaters in the deposits and literally cooking the earth.

And that's the Alberta tar sands for you: the industry already contributing to climate change more than any other is frantically turning up the heat. The process of refining bitumen emits three to four times the greenhouse gases produced by extracting oil from traditional wells, making the tar sands the largest single contributor to Canada's growth in greenhouse-gas emissions. The $100 billion in projected investments from the tar sands have also turned Canada into a global climate renegade.

That money is the primary reason why, at the June 6 to 8 G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, my country's oil-friendly prime minister, Stephen Harper, will [this article was written before the summit] join George W. Bush in opposing all serious attempts to cap or reduce greenhouse gases. Back at home [this was first published in the USA], his government fully supports the oil industry's plans to more than triple tar sands production by 2020, with no end in sight. If prices stay high, it will soon become profitable to extract an additional 141 billion barrels from the tar sands, which would place the largest oil reserves in the world in Alberta. ...