JANUARY 2011 Home Subscribe Archive Contact Thematic Focus: Resource Efficiency, Ecosystem Management, and Climate Change

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Athabasca River; Canada
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.685.3598; http://na.unep.net/api/geas/articles/getArticlePDFWithArticleIDScript.php?article_id%3D54

Why is this issue important? The Athabasca Oil Sands region of Alberta, Canada forms the second-largest deposit of recoverable oil in the world after Saudi Arabia (Whitfield and others 2010). The energy and environmental costs of extracting oil from oil sands have made their development very controversial. The oil sands industry burns about 22.5 million m3 of natural gas daily to extract bitumen (Tenenbaum 2009). This burning is the main source of the over 8 000 tonnes of CO2 per year emitted by the oil sands industry and accounts for much of Canada's growing CO2 emissions (Humphries 2008). In addition, the oil sands mines release a significant amount of SO2 and other atmospheric pollutants (Williams 2010). Water is used in oil sands extraction to help separate the bitumen from the oil sands. The industry already diverts around 150 million m3 of water from the Athabasca River and the Canadian government has approved diversions of more than twice that volume, raising concerns about inadequate flow (Humphries 2008). Waste-water disposal from the production process goes into large tailing ponds and poses a threat to groundwater and surface water quality, wildlife and soils if leakage occurs