[NYTr] BP: The biggest environmental crime in history

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Independent - Dec 10, 2007
http://environment.independent.co.uk/article3239364.ece

'The biggest environmental crime in history'

By Cahal Milmo

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move "Beyond Petroleum" by
finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of
abandoning its "green sheen" by investing nearly #1.5bn to extract oil
from the Canadian wilderness using methods which environmentalists say
are part of the "biggest global warming crime" in history.

The multinational oil and gas producer, which last year made a profit of
#11bn, is facing a head-on confrontation with the green lobby in the
pristine forests of North America after Greenpeace pledged a direct
action campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a
long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called "oil
sands" that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the
world's second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Producing crude oil from the tar sands  a heavy mixture of bitumen,
water, sand and clay  found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of
prime forest in northern Alberta  an area the size of England and Wales
combined  generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal
global warming gas, than conventional drilling. The booming oil sands
industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth
of the UK's entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that
Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according
to environmentalist activists.

The oil rush is also scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of
tonnes of plant life and top soil is scooped away in vast open-pit
mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers  up to
five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude
and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas. The industry,
which now includes all the major oil multinationals, including the
Anglo-Dutch Shell and American combine Exxon-Mobil, boasts that it
takes two tonnes of the raw sands to produce a single barrel of oil. BP
insists it will use a less damaging extraction method, but it accepts
that its investment will increase its carbon footprint.

Mike Hudema, the climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace in
Canada, told The Independent: "BP has done a very good job in recent
years of promoting its green objectives. By jumping into tar sands
extraction it is taking part in the biggest global warming crime ever
seen and BP's green sheen is gone.

"It takes about 29kg of CO2 to produce a barrel of oil conventionally.
That figure can be as much 125kg for tar sands oil. It also has the
potential to kill off or damage the vast forest wilderness, greater
than the size of England and Wales, which forms part of the world's
biggest carbon sinks. For BP to be involved in this trade not only
flies in the face of their rhetoric but in the era of climate change it
should not be being developed at all. You cannot call yourself 'Beyond
Petroleum' and involve yourself in tar sands extraction." Mr Hudema
said Greenpeace was planning a direct action campaign against BP, which
could disrupt its activities as its starts construction work in Alberta
next year.

The company had shied away from involvement oil sands, until recently
regarded as economically unviable and environmentally unpleasant. Lord
Browne of Madingley, who was BP's chief executive until May, sold its
remaining Canadian tar sands interests in 1999 and declared as recently
as 2004 that there were "tons of opportunities" beyond the sector. But
as oil prices hover around the $100-per-barrel mark, Lord Browne's
successor, Tony Hayward, announced that BP has entered a joint venture
with Husky Energy, owned by the Hong Kong based billionaire Li
Ka-Shing, to develop a tar sands facility which will be capable of
producing 200,000 barrels of crude a day by 2020. In return for a half
share of Husky's Sunrise field in the Athabasca region of Alberta, the
epicentre of the tar sands industry, BP has sold its partner a 50 per
cent stake in its Toledo oil refinery in Ohio. The companies will
invest $5.5bn (#2.7) in the project, making BP one of the biggest
players in tar sands extraction.

Mr Hayward made it clear that BP considered its investment was the
start of a long-term presence in Alberta. He said: "BP's move into oil
sands is an opportunity to build a strategic, material position and the
huge potential of Sunrise is the ideal entry point for BP into Canadian
oil sands."

Canada claims that it has 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil in
Alberta, making the province second only to Saudi Arabia in proved oil
riches and sparking a #50bn "oil rush" as American, Chinese and
European investors rush to profit from high oil prices. Despite
production costs per barrel of up to #15, compared to #1 per barrel in
Saudi Arabia, the Canadian province expects to be pumping five million
barrels of crude a day by 2030.

BP said it will be using a technology that pumps steam heated by
natural gas into vertical wells to liquefy the solidified oil sands and
pump it to the surface in a way that is less damaging than open cast
mining. But campaigners said this method requires 1,000 cubic feet of
gas to produce one barrel of unrefined bitumen  the same required to
heat an average British home for 5.5 days.

A spokesman for BP added: "These are resources that would have been
developed anyway."

Licenses have been issued by the Albertan government to extract 350
million cubic metres of water from the Athabasca River every year. But
the water used in the extraction process, say campaigners, is so
contaminated that it cannot be returned to the eco-system and must
instead be stored in vast "tailings ponds" that cover up to 20 square
miles and there is evidence of increased rates of cancer and multiple
sclerosis in down-river communities.

Experts say a pledge to restore all open cast tar sand mines to their
previous pristine condition has proved sadly lacking. David Schindler,
professor of ecology at the University of Alberta, said: "Right now the
big pressure is to get that money out of the ground, not to reclaim the
landscape. I wouldn't be surprised if you could see these pits from a
satellite 1,000 years from now."