Air pollution over Alberta oil sands up to 6,300% higher than reported
vancouverisawesome.com
vancouverisawesome.com
What works for monitoring in other basins is obviously insufficient for the oil sands, so it's good to see the federal government funding these sorts of studies. It will likely lead to better monitoring and reporting regulations, but the Alberta government will likely scream that a Trudeau is trying to f** us over once again. The last time in the 80s was plain protectionism, while this is protectionism for a much better reason.
I love my province, but man, are we stupid sometimes.
The oil produced mostly gets shipped to the US, where we sell it at a discount because it's crappy quality. This in turns helps the US pollute more but save dollars in the process. Oil sands oil makes up about 14% of US oil consumption.
If I was dictator of Alberta, I wouldn't do anything to stop production, I would just make a law that any production energy has to come from renewable, non-carbon sources. It would generate a frenzy of research and development that hasn't been seen since the industrial revolution as people pant and salivate at all that money sitting in the ground. :)
I eventually decided I wouldn't work for oil companies any longer. If they want to do it, they'll have to do it without me. It has led me down a fun career path of working for companies I only dreamed about working for when I was in school.
Energy statistics by a partisan group, so numbers might be biased: https://sustainablesociety.com/research-material/oil-sands/
Energy stats worldwide: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I like your idea better, but perhaps a softer touch might get more traction?
I agree, there's probably a good reason I'm not dictator of Alberta. Several reasons, actually. Something something dehumanizing people something..
Like, if the government fails to crack down on illegal drug distribution and all its associated externalities, is that a subsidy? Where does it end? It's nonsense.
It's semantics: instead of giving money directly to the organization, let them make money and have the public money be spent to clean up the mess they made. Same difference: private profit and public expenditure for it.
This is a dumb statistic and doesn’t help prove a point. It can “take 3 barrels” to produce 2 and it would still be worth it because it doesn’t actually take 3 barrels. It takes the energy equivalent and the value of oil is the energy density with its portability.
Today, the statistic is still relevant because we've got other ways to make energy-dense portable fuels from renewables.
[0] unless you can substitute oil for another energy source, which was only sometimes part of those discussions, the rest of the time it was "prepare for collapse!" with images from the original Mad Max films.
I want to echo this point, because it gets talked about in the popular media like it's just another kind of garden variety crude oil, when it is anything but. For the curious, there are independent sellers (on ebay and elsewhere) who sell specimens of the stuff, along with samples of other kinds of raw fossil fuel and energy minerals. It's very helpful for demos and discussions like this one.
This stuff is almost literally road tar mixed with sand, almost like asphalt. It's difficult to break up by hand when cold, and when warm it has a tarry, putty-like texture. Contrast this with light-sweet crude, which is a pale yellow, gasoline-smelling liquid. Once you have a feel for these things, it doesn't take a leap of the imagination to grasp that the latter is going to take a lot less effort and energy to turn into useful products than the former!
It uses a ton of water. I think more than oil sands so, if the oil sands displace some fracking it is a global net positive to have that substation.
About a decade ago I realized we are going to extract all the oil, no matter what. All we can do is try to slow the rate to give nature time to heal and maybe develop counter measures to pollution.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/25/climate/frack...
Also: this page is really interesting generally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakken_formation
4C warming is going to be toasty. Mind you, timescales matter; we don't have to extract all the oil now, this century, despite what drillers demand.
They don't actually use oil to produce the oil though, do they? If they need heat it would be cheaper to use (say) natural gas.
> between 1,900 per cent and 6,300 per cent higher than industry has reported
Maybe that's just me, but I find it harder to think in percentages above 200%. I mean, the math is easy, but it is less intuitive. I feel that: "20 to 64 times of what industry has reported" would be easier to grasp and probably also less ambiguous.
"So, I was 20% over the speed limit, and I got a huge fine."
"Oil producers were 6000% over the pollution limit and they got a huge profit."
Yes, we have to dig things out of the ground to sustain our society. Oil, metals, minerals. It's not clean. We do what we can.
You can insert the "we should improve society" somewhat meme all you want, but it doesn't hide that fact that the people who complain the most are just as likely to reap the rewards of all the things they hate.
It's a lot like coal - we're at the point where its abundantly clear we need to get off coal for the health of the planet, and luckily many jurisdictions are doing so. Yes, we could "reap rewards" of coal, and if I happened to be living in an area that generated its power from coal I would be reaping this reward, but I would be valid in saying that we need to get off coal and switch to less polluting means of producing energy.
Bitumen is analogous. We can do better.
But even in the south of the province it feels like the air quality has been deteriorating. We seem to get air pollution warnings are long more than I ever remember growing up.
But the climate change discourse is so poisoned, and scientific research so politicized, I find this hard to believe. 63 times? It's a headline meant to grab attention. It's simply not possible this is the case without anyone ever noticing prior, or massive liability issues. Blame the companies, of course. But how could the government be so inept to allow it? It's extraordinary. To the point I can't even be bothered to look at the paper, since I have to assume they are measuring something completely different.
Fighting against stupid climate change policies isn't "denying climate change". Policies like, I don't know, clamping down on our oil extraction and pipelines locally, and instead buying the resources from adversarial countries.
Yeah, it feels strange!
But the numbers are just too drastically different that it's impossible for me to reconcile.
It's not 63x more than estimated, or thought, or calculated. It's not an error somewhere in the process to calculate it. It is 63x worse than reported by an industry that has routinely lied about their impact on the climate. It is very, very possible.
It's possible, but not plausible, to me.
You can talk about those "evil oil companies", but this is 2024. It's hard to imagine them under-reporting so drastically, again, to me. What is there to gain? If this is real, it's going to be the end of them.
> "evil oil companies", but this is 2024
Same companies, and often same people. They can keep the climate change denial going as long as they're making money from it.
Only because the people profiting from fossil fuels completely lie and deny facts to make it "politicized".
No different than when young Earth creationists claimed that evolution or astronomy were "politicized" and demanded that schools "teach the controversy" or put warning stickers on biology textbooks to say that the science doesn't align to Biblical creation stories.
The rhetoric to deny climate change constantly moves the goal posts. First it's not real, then it's real but not human caused, then it's human caused but too late to change, then it's not too late to change but the proposed solutions are too expensive, then the solutions are reasonable but involve too much government intervention, etc.
The discourse isn't poisoned and the research isn't politicized. It's a fact, and pretending it's "politicized" is just the latest angle the fossil fuel profiteers are using in their propaganda campaign.
The paper is saying that the numbers reported by industry are made on the basis of a few pollutant species, but looking at a much wider set of potential pollutants yields this "6300%" figure.
Why are they relying on the industry to self report these?
> Past monitoring has failed to capture the full scope of organic carbon pollution because it wasn’t looking at a diverse enough range of molecular sizes often associated with heavy oil and bitumen deposits. Such deposits are expected to account for 40 per cent of global oil production by 2040, the study found.
Typical example: in BC people turn on their head/taillights in bad weather. In Alberta, heck no. Lights don't come on until legally mandated at sunset. Freedom.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/books/review/how-to-tell-...
The fact that they managed to get everyone out of the path of the fire successfully impressed me given the circumstances
x + x * 6300% == 64 * x