Canada Announces 30% Emissions Cut; Meanwhile, Here's Some Exponential Tar Sands Growth For You

[hatrack]

?imgmax=800

EDIT

23 May 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Recently, Canada announced that it will reduce carbon emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by the year 2030. But the province of Alberta is home to the Athabasca bitumen mines, aka the “Alberta tar sands” mines. The disastrous environmental effects of Alberta’s open pit mines have been well documented, e.g., by the Pembina Institute. In particular, “oilsands in northern Alberta are the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.”

How fast are carbon emissions from the bitumen mines growing? We can get an idea by looking at data published by Statistics Canada (CANSIM). Stuart Staniford’s Early Warning blog did the analysis in 2010 (h/t Alexander Ač and found:

?imgmax=800

Stuart observes:

Some interesting points to me:

About half of tar sands production is actually tar, not oil.
Compound annual growth rate from 2000-2009 (average of the first nine months of each) was 9.6%.
Production did not appreciably slow down in late 2008/early 2009 as a result of the great recession.

Alexander Ač updated Stuart’s graph with the latest data (through February 2015) and found that growth in tar sands mine production is exponential. Des followed Stuart’s instructions for getting the data from CANSIM and reproduced this graph.

EDIT

Extrapolating Desdemona’s graph shows production in the ballpark of CERI’s projections. The projection for 2030 is about 1 mbpd below the extrapolation, possibly indicating logistic behavior.

?imgmax=800

With Alberta’s tar sands production on a trajectory of exponential growth, it’s hard to see how Canada will meet its carbon reduction target. Of course, much of this oil will be exported, and those carbon emissions will go to another country’s carbon budget.

EDIT

http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2015/05/graph-of-day-exponential-production.html

[marym625]

1. K&R

[daleanime]

2. kick, kick, kick....

[GliderGuider]

3. You know that projecting trend lines is a totally illegitimate exercise in unjustified doomerism

According to some people here.

Others of us just look at the data and say, "Estamos tan jodidos!"