Battle for Canada's Underground Resources

[chlamor]

Battle for Canada's underground resources

by Robert Collier

While Congress debates whether to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a similar battle with much higher stakes is under way in northwest Canada.

The $6 billion Mackenzie Pipeline project would open the Canadian Arctic for natural gas drilling and send the gas 800 miles south down the Mackenzie River Valley to Alberta. There, much of this fuel would be used to throttle up production in a huge but hard-to-tap supply of petroleum dispersed in underground gravel formations. These so-called oil sands hold petroleum reserves that are second in size only to Saudi Arabia's, and analysts say they could supply a large portion of U.S. energy needs for decades to come But the project has sparked opposition from some native tribal groups, which call it a federal grab of their ancestral lands, and from environmentalists, who say it would churn out greenhouse gases linked to global warming..

<snip>

But environmentalists say the process of burning large amounts of energy just to get more energy is reckless. "The oil sands are the world's dirtiest source of oil," said Stephen Hazell, director of the Sierra Club of Canada's campaign against the Mackenzie pipeline.
The oil sands expansion is expected to increase Canada's emissions of greenhouse gases by as much as 12 percent of the country's total allotment under the Kyoto Protocol, making it almost impossible for the government to meet its commitments for reducing emissions, Hazell said.

<snip>

Although U.S. officials hope the output from Alberta's oil sands will be exported mainly south of the border, Chinese officials are trying to lock up long-term contracts for oil that would be sent through a proposed pipeline to the coast at British Columbia and then exported via tanker to China.

"There have been Chinese delegations in every skyscraper in Calgary," said George, the analyst."The Chinese are doing what the United States is doing, scouring the planet for every molecule of oil production they can get their hands on."

http://www.energybulletin.net/4942.html