oil sands

An environmental catastrophe is underway in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada -- home to the most energy-intensive and dirtiest industrial enterprise on Earth. And it’s about to infect the Great Lakes Basin and the US Midwest, too.

That's according to an excellent new report out of the University of Toronto, How the Oil Sands Got to the Great Lakes (pdf).

Here's the short of what happened. Demand for the sticky, dirty-to-extract crude of the tar sands (called bitumen) soared. The sector exploded. The pressure to develop kept mounting, with no political will to curb it, despite the serious climate and financial risks involved.

That triggered the need/greed for more capacity out of the tar sands and into the destination markets of the US Midwest. And it led to this idea. The building of a continent-wide network of pipelines, some thousands of miles long, to transport the crude, as well as refinery expansions on the US side of the Great Lakes to process the raw goo into gas.

It's a massive infrastructure change, the advent of a whole new fossil fuel supply chain, or a "pollution delivery system," as the author calls it. And it's well on its way.

The Wall Street Journal may not like T. Boone Pickens' clean energy plan, but it has a lot of merit. What Pickens sees -- and the WSJ ignores -- is that our oil-driven global economy is stretched to the limit and is likely not sustainable.

A telling indicator is an enormous oil-extraction project in Alberta, Canada -- an enormous energy-intensive, financially questionable undertaking that oil companies are now treating as the next great oil bonanza.

The architects behind the Alberta oil sands project – the largest and dirtiest energy venture on Earth -- are in for a crude awakening. And fast. That’s because their prized $150 billion "black gold" enterprise is gulping up an unsustainable amount of water.

A whole river in fact.

The stats will surprise, courtesy of an excellent exposé in the Globe and Mail. But here’s the skinny.