Tar Sands and Pipelines - What's the Gold Rush

I live in British Columbia.  At the moment there is a black-gold rush going on in Canada with regard to the efforts of large, multi-national petrochemical companies seeking to exploit the Canadian tar sands.

The tar sands represent a huge petrochemical resource in Canada, albeit one that is locked in a tar-like form, which when extracted is called bitumen.

The multi-national companies, with the support of the Canadian Federal Government are strip mining the Western Canadian hinterland.  The investments are in the multi billions of dollars.

From the point of view of the above players, since the primary anticipated markets for this oil is off shore, the difficulty they face is that the resource they are tearing out of the ground is landlocked.  The challenge they are currently attempting to overcome is one of moving the bitumen thousands of kilometres to ocean ports.

The challenges of movement are not technological as much as political.  Most of the population who live in areas through which the bitumen is intended to move do not want to have this troublesome product in their back yard.  Especially if the increased production is to be used primarily to feed the insatiable appetites of far off lands.

In fact, at the moment, these same corporations already move product from the tar sands to offshore markets.  And frankly, this is a solid export for the Canadian economy.

The problem is that they are currently in the process of attempting to hugely expand production, and it is the intended expanded production that has many crying foul.

Unfortunately, the dispute is often cast in terms of polar opposites.   On one side, people who are keen for growth in extraction and who argue that this creates great revenue for Canadian citizens and for government revenues.  The suggestion is that on the other side are people who only want to shut everything down and close the door to petrochemical extraction.

I think that the latter characterization is not helpful.  While the people with concerns likely are very concerned about human-cased global climate change, most of we Canadians also know that even with the best of intentions no nations are going to be able to immediately shut down our use of hydrocarbons.  And since tar sands petroleum is already part of the mix, one would hardly expect us to immediately close the existing extraction processes.

The biggest concern at the moment is the plans for INCREASED EXTRACTION.   If we don't increase the extraction, we don't need the additional capacity to export more than is being done at the moment.

Faced with climate change, we certainly need to think very seriously about the use of all carbon-based emissions; but more importantly at the moment, at least in terms of the tar sands, is that we need to BACK WAY, WAY OFF the idea of UNBRIDLED EXPANSION.

For the moment, it is impractical to turn off the spigot; but this is not an endorsement of opening ten fire hydrants full blast.