Black Bonanza: Canada's Oil Sands and the Race to Secure North America's Energy Future
Various groups are campaigning hard against mining the Athabasca Sands, but do we want or even need to curtail what may well prove to be the greatest engineering achievement of the last or coming century?What started out as a resource no one thought very much of has become an economic powerhouse and an abundant source of easily accessible energy. From the pioneering days in the middle of the 20th century through the booms and technological breakthroughs of the 1990s and 2000s and the constant political wrangling along the way, the Alberta Oil Sands are showing their promise as the most abundant source of petroleum available to us now and into the next century.While there have been environmental challenges,Black Bonanzabreaks down the myths surrounding the development of the oil sands and the harvesting of this "dirty oil," and shows people the real state of affairs in Alberta, Canada. Panicked naysayers are insisting all activity be shut down immediately under the banner of environmentalism, but the truth of the matter is that not only is oil production from the Sands cleaner than other major energy options such as coal mining, its impact is relatively mild and geographically minor. The producers are continually improving sustainability, using fewer resources per barrel and governments are now requiring them to speed up the reclamation of old mining sites. Best of all, new technologies are increasingly moving extraction underground, where the environmental footprint is much smaller. This is opening up a brand new bonanza-the 90% of the Sands that can't be mined-amounting to a breathtaking trillion barrels of oil or more.Despite gains made in solar, wind and tide energy generation, we still live in a petroleum economy, and the Athabasca Sands will allow the world enough time to make a smooth sea change to sustainable solutions while avoiding the risks of dealing with undemocratic and unstable petrostates.Sweeny presents a compelling and contrarian case that while there are still serious issues that need to be addressed, Canada's oil sands represent the best hope for energy stability and responsible economic and environmental growth in the future.