Questions raised included how Alberta and Canada at large plan to meet greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets with the expansion of tar sands oil extraction, and whether or not the burning of natural gas for the production of oil is a trade off which makes sense today.  

Alberta represents one of the world’s largest reserves of tar sands – second only to Saudi Arabia. Oil or tar sands is a mixture of sand, clay, water and mainly heavy crude oil. The oil can be recovered from the sand either via open quarries or by using pressurized steam.

The extraction of oil from tar sands is very energy intensive and, as a result, produces vast amounts of GHG emissions – about 6-10 times higher per barrel of oil when extracting with steam when compared to conventional oil extraction. Meanwhile, tar sands oil extraction requires huge quantities of water – about two to five barrels of fresh water for barrel of oil.  But as world demand for crude oil continues to rise and conventional sources of oil, coal and gas become increasingly expensive, countries such as Canada are investing heavily in the extraction of crude oil from tar sands.

On May 19th a roundtable discussion was hosted by the Canadian Mission to the EU to discuss Alberta’s oil extraction from tar sands. The panel was made up by the Honourable Rob Renner, Alberta Minister of  Environment; Professor Huellt from the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers; and John Broadhurst, Vice-President for Development and Technology for Shell Canada. The audience was formed by representatives from the European Commission, NGOs, think tanks and industry.

The panelists covered a broad range of topics, including the regulatory incentives put in place to help develop greener technologies – such as wind energy – in Alberta. Minister Renner explained that a tax on CO₂ emissions from tar sand oil extraction is currently in place at 15 Canadian dollars (=€11.6) per tonne.

“Admittedly the tax is set too low to harness a significant level of investment in alternative technologies, but carbon is still $15 more expensive in Canada than in the US”, Minister Renner said.

Meanwhile, investment in tar sands is huge and growing. In total, the Albertan government expects 3 million barrels of oil to be extracted per day by 2018.

When asked how Canada plans to keep to its mid-term carbon budget given the amount of CO₂ emissions caused by tar sands, Minister Renner said that Alberta awaits the coming of new carbon mitigating technologies. Examples cited included CO₂ capture and storage (CCS) and improvements in transport fleet efficiency.

The problem is that despite being a technology key to the fight against climate change, CCS does not solve the environmental damage caused by tar sands. The procedure is energy intensive from the outset, with lifecycle emissions remaining high throughout as the oil is usually burned in small combustion plants or engines without CCS. In other words, CCS is a solution suitable for making power from fossil fuels but not for making oil from tar sands.

When commenting on this issue, Minister Renner explained that most of the CO₂ emissions from Alberta do not, in fact, come from the tar sands. Alberta’s biggest emitter by a long way is its collection of coal-fired electric power plants.

Yet the process by which oil is extracted involves significant amounts of natural gas (also available in Alberta), which heats the water and produces the steam needed for oil extraction. Natural gas is a comparatively “cleaner” fuel as it has lower lifecycle GHG emissions than coal, for example. This begs the question of whether it makes sense to use one of the cleanest fuels to produce one of the dirtiest, especially bearing in mind the amount of heat and electricity being produced by coal in the region.

Minister Renner told the attendees that the reason for this is that a greater overall amount of energy can be produced by using gas to extract oil whilst keeping the coal power plants running, as opposed to using natural gas to produce heat and electricity directly.

“With Minister Renner’s aim to maximize the extraction of energy from fossil fuels, this planet is going to get very, very warm,” says Veronica Webster from Bellona Europa.