Canada's Highway to Hell

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CEMA's Sustainable Ecosystems Working Group, meanwhile, has posted only one document on wildlife; the subject was toads. Yet a 2006 study ("Death by a Thousand Cuts") by the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based energy watchdog, reported that woodland caribou populations around current in situ developments have crashed by 50 percent in the last decade, and that fur-bearing animals and boreal songbirds will decline by 80 percent in industrialized tar-sands landscapes. The paper concluded that in situ projects alone would "push many species over the brink."

The association's avoidance of groundwater issues is also alarming. In situ thermal operations, which inject steam into underground formations of bitumen, typically draw their water from fresh or salty aquifers. But these operations are growing so quickly that industry now uses three times more water than the government ever predicted. Many of the oil-bearing geologic formations lie beneath shallow aquifers and wetlands. In a comprehensive 2005 study for the Alberta Energy Research Institute, independent consultant Bruce Peachey noted that in situ projects could create such huge voids in the ground that water from shallow aquifers and surface wetlands could fill them on a "mega scale." If this happened, Peachey concluded, it would either compromise the environment or diminish energy supplies (and the revenues they bring).

So CEMA's performance to date has been underwhelming. "They've spent heroic sums of money and have been very reticent to share information," says a prominent ecologist who formerly worked for CEMA and who requested anonymity. "A lot of their studies are absolute s**t. Some read like the [tar] sands are nirvana and everything is a win, win, win. The fundamental issues have been ignored."

Neither Canadian political leaders nor the Canadian media have talked much about the fundamentals of water, trees, or carbon in Alberta. But the federal government has excitedly championed the fact that the tar sands will contribute nearly a trillion dollars to the nation's gross domestic product by 2020 and boost the continent's energy security. Tar-sands CEOs typically describe the megaproject as "an anchor of prosperity that has drawn interest and inspired the hopes of opinion-shapers and policy makers all over the world." Some U.S. analysts, such as Frederick Cedoz at the Global Water & Energy Strategy Team, a Washington, D.C.-based advisory group, even claim that "Canadians have proven that, with patience, the brightest minds and a little bit of money can tackle the toughest energy challenges."

A growing number of critics believe that's oily nonsense. The most incisive skeptic may be Houston investment banker Simmons, who doesn't think that the tar sands can reach a targeted production of three million barrels a day "without basically destroying Alberta." His advice for Canadian and Alberta policy makers is stark: Go slow, charge for water, cap tar-sands production, and "find some other way to produce this atrocious resource than using scarce natural gas..... To get more addicted to the tar sands doesn't make any sense to me."

About 46 miles north of Fort McMurray, the Highway to Hell crosses the Athabasca River at a place the locals used to call the bridge to nowhere. Now the bridge delivers thousands of workers to Shell's Albian Mine, Imperial's Kearl Mine, and a Chinese-run outfit known as Syneco. Near the river a small patch of forest has been spared the truck-and-shovel makeover. Two years ago archeologists found more than 300,000 ancient artifacts on the site, including knives, scrapers, stone flakes, microblades, and even a spear point with mammoth blood on it.

That's where I found Derrick Kershaw, a tar-sands veteran and senior vice president of Birch Mountain Resources, a gravel mining company. Kershaw called the site "overwhelmingly important" -- so significant, in fact, that his company has volunteered to set it aside as a protected area even though it is building the largest gravel quarry in Canada right next door to provide the tar sands with aggregate.

Standing by a small, nondescript excavation in the forest, Kershaw told a remarkable tale. Ten thousand years ago a great glacier rapidly melted and released a massive flood of water, which scraped away the forest floor and exposed a rare, fine-grained limestone. The stone made such superb tools that a tribe of entrepreneurs set up camp here every summer, producing reliable killing weapons for most of western Canada.

Kershaw, a tall engineer with a British accent, continued the tale. "The quarry was a source of projectile points and was a hell of a lot more valuable than oil. It fed families. These people were kings in their day. It was their boom. It was their currency, just as we are kings today with oil. So the cycle continues." A boom in weather-changing tars, then, has replaced a boom in killing stones.

The footprint of "the quarry of the ancestors" probably occupied a square mile. In contrast, the tar-sands operation is well on its way to consuming more than 50,000 times as much land. But Kershaw didn't think the people of Fort McMurray had got "their minds around the fact that Saudi Arabia is coming to northeast Alberta." The only question left to be resolved was "how big it should be." The people who will shape the answer are U.S. oil consumers.