Tar sands oil production is unique in that we have gross pollution on both ends of the pipeline.
Hardly unique. Any oil production, transporting, refining and of course burning involves some pollution. When you consider full well-to-wheels picture oil sands do not put that much more carbon pollution than conventional oils. According to
this, oil sands produce, on average, only 3% more carbon than US Gulf oil and 9% more than Saudi oil.
And as I said, we do not have enough conventional oil to meet global demands, so we will have to use oil sands for the foreseeable future. The only question is how to move it from A to B and where A will be (Canada or Venezuela for example).
This type of strip mining has already destroyed hundrends of square miles of boreal forests and polluted many aquifers and surface waters to the tune of hundreds of more square miles.
There is some strip mining but that is only a small fraction of total boreal forest area. Furthermore strip mining is a common technique and you don't get the same emotional overreaction when they strip mine for coal or copper etc.
This is a copper mine in Utah by the way. Doesn't look that much different than oil sands, but you don't hear low information liberals bitch about copper all the time.
There are huge reservoirs of processing waste at the extraction site
Waste water is a common product of most industrial processes, including conventional oil where oil injection is frequently used. Furthermore, water is reused several times before being discarded into tailing ponds. See
here.
and there is also a large carbon footprint for the initial process at the site.
Most of oil's carbon footprint comes from final burning of refined products. Therefore, the carbon footprint of the initial extraction is secondary. Furthermore, moving the oil sands by rail instead of by pipeline would actually increase overall well-to-wheel emissions.
In fact the energy this process consumes is so massive, nuclear energy (still another pollution) has been considered to provide the energy at the site.
I like that idea. It would be a good way to use heat that would otherwise go to waste and could make electricity as well. It would certainly reduce overall carbon footprint of the extraction process. So what's wrong with that?
By the way, this is in reference to a different process from strip mining. Where oil sands deposits are very close to surface they get strip mined. Where they are deeper, they have to use an "in situ" technique where steam is injected into the deposits. This technique has a far smaller land footprint that strip mining of course.
It is a marginal energy gain for the amount of pollution created.
No, it's a considerable energy gain for a marginal amount of pollution produced.
And that is just at the site. Building a big gulp pipeline for these people gives them the means to expand many times as fast as they have thusfar.
And what's wrong with that? Mature conventional fields will keep declining in production which means that the only way to maintain worldwide production is to develop new fields and increase production from existing that have not been maxed out yet.
For example about half of Saudi production comes from a field (Ghawar) that is over 60 years old now. Most other supergiant fields in KSA and worldwide are old as well. Which means we increasingly need to rely on difficult and nonconventional oil. Age of sticking a pipe into desert (Texas or Arabian likewise) and getting a gusher are long gone. Now we need to go deeper, further north, we have to pump water or CO
2, we have to use lower grade hydrocarbons like bitumen. That's reality of our age of transition away from the oil economy. But be not deceived, this transitional age will itself last decades.
The land and water devastation this process leaves behind is extreme and will be a problem for generations to come.
Not significantly more so than other mining operations. Remember that many of the oil sands there are very close to the surface and rivers like Athabasca actually cut their way through the raw deposits (one can see bitumen along the banks). That means that all the hydrocarbons are naturally leaching into the watershed and have done so for tens of thousands of years. Industrial production did increase pollution some, but that is inevitable, and it is not as if it introduced foreign pollutants into some sort of virginal, unspoiled landscape.
Furthermore, oil sands companies must, by law,
restore the land once they are done with it. Will PDVSA be required to do that with the Orinoco Belt oil sands developments (that McKibben and other Canadian oil sands foes seemingly have no problems with)?
The tar sands need to stay where they are.
As I said, even if ecomentalists managed to kill Canadian oil sands (unlikely as it is) all they would accomplish is shift production to other players like Venezuela that don't have nearly as strict environmental regulations. I.e. ecomentalists would be, as so often, cutting off their nose to spite their face.
No KXL pipeline...the best idea...the best response.
No, the best idea and best response would be to approve KXL already.
I am all for protecting the environment but I am also realistic in that we need oil for the foreseeable future. And oil sands will be a significant part of the mix going forward what with shrinking easy conventional reserves shrinking. And I am under no illusions that socialist Chavista oil sands are any less polluting than Canadian ones. Quite the opposite!