The oil sands industry of Canada has taken an important step toward refuting the “dirty oil” claims of environmental activism.
Twelve producers of bitumen and heavy oil have formed Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) to promote collaboration in service to environmental performance.
The group shows healthy appreciation for practicality in a press-release statement about “breaking down barriers in the areas of funding, intellectual property enforcement, and human resources.”
In the practical world, companies tend to want to keep their best ideas and methods to themselves. But environmental responsibility demands the application by everyone of the best ideas and methods discovered by anyone.
Without question, oil sands development disturbs the environment. Compared with development of conventional resources, it requires more energy, more water, and sometimes more surface disruption.
But the work has to be done. Modern society increasingly needs the energy abounding in oil sands and other unconventional resources. It can’t get the energy anywhere else in required amounts at affordable cost.
For that reason, environmental activism aimed at foreclosing oil sands development is unreasonable.
To the extent bitumen and heavy oil are “dirty,” a reasonable environmental goal is to make them less so, even as development proceeds.
Pressure to improve environmental performance is stronger in the oil sands of Alberta than anywhere else. Progress is impressive already. Water and energy requirements are diminishing in mining and in situ operations. So is surface disturbance. Management of tailing ponds has greatly improved. Capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide is under active study.
Solutions to the environmental problems of oil sands work will adapt to other unconventional oil and gas operations, even other forms of energy, including coal.
Thwarting oil sands development under near-sighted slogans about “dirty oil” thus would foreclose environmental progress of the serious kind—the kind that sustains itself along with, rather than instead of, economically sensible activity.
COSIA says it will build on past progress. Much about the future of energy supply depends on fulfillment of that promise.
(Online Mar. 2, 2012; author’s e-mail: [email protected])