Laugh of the day: TorStar claims ‘an area twice the size of New Brunswick’ will be strip-mined for oil sands.

Via CIVITATENSIS comes a great piece of misinformation from the Toronto Star regarding some basic facts about the oil sands. I pity da fool who depends on the Toronto Star for balanced coverage of anything Alberta. Go ahead, read the Toronto Star if you don’t care about anything resembling a decent representation of the oil sands.

Here it is:

The tar sands cover about one-fifth of Alberta’s land mass and so far an area twice the size of New Brunswick as been mined for tar.

And, in the same article:

Tar sand deposits are less than 141,000 square kilometres of boreal forest and muskeg, almost all of it in Alberta. To recover the oil the land is stripped mined.

. . .

According to the Pembina Institute, 47,832 hectares of land have been destroyed for tar sands mine development from 1967 to 2006 and to date only 0.2 per cent of that land has been certified as “reclaimed.”

Can you spot the errors?

The Pembina Institute is quoted right in the article as saying “47,832 hectares of land have been destroyed for tar sands mine development from 1967 to 2006″. Using a simple online converter, we can see this is equal to 478.32 square kilometers.

A quick visit to wikipedia reveals New Brunswick’s total area, measured in square kilometers, including water bodies: 72,908 square kilometers.

This is equal to two-thirds of one percent of New Brunswick’s total land mass.

The Star gives the impression that 141,000 square kilometers are going to be strip mined for oil sands, which is flat out false. There are three (maybe four) total areas of Alberta where bitumen is found, and only in one area can that oil be accessed via strip-mining. The rest must come from SAGD and other, less intrusive methods, which do not require the surface to be obliterated. (Admittedly though, it results in some fragmentation of the surface).

The best map of the oil sands I have seen is a handy one from Alberta Energy entitled: “Alberta’s Oil Sands Projects”. It can be found HERE in pdf format. It outlines three large areas in blue, labelled for Peace River, Athabasca and Cold lake. To make it easy, I’ve highlighted the mineable area for you.

These are areas where oil sand deposits are found. The smaller area in the upper-right corner, outlined in magenta, is the total area that could be strip-mined. I count 37 townships in total, each measuring 9.7 kilometers per side. This is equal to 3481 square kilometers that could potentially turn into a moonscape. This is assuming the entire area will be stripped. For comparison, Toronto’s greater urban area is an estimated 7125 square kilometers. The total area, while huge, is a lot smaller than what TorStar is claiming.

From Wiki:

Alberta estimated that the Athabasca deposits alone contain 35 billion barrels (5.6×109 m3) of surface mineable bitumen and 98 billion barrels (15.6×109 m3) of bitumen recoverable by in-situ methods.

Most of Alberta’s bitumen exists in deposits located outside the mineable area, which is the final nail in the TorStar PWN-coffin. The word “mineable” is a combination of the words “mine” (in reference to a moonscape where the boreal forest and overburden has been stripped away to access sub-surface bitumen), and the word “able”, which connotates an ability to. Thus, the term “mineable deposits” refers to a subset of deposits one can process through strip-mining. It’s basic economics: it might be profitable to remove 30 metres of overburden (muskeg, forest) to access a 50 metre-thick seam of bitumen, but unprofitable to remove 30 metres of overburden to access a seam that’s only 4 metres thick. That’s where steam injection or toe-to-heel air injection come into play. Economics and geology dictate that three-fourths of Alberta’s oil sands are not economical to mine, and must instead use SAGD.