A tar sands story

Canadian Natural Resources, Canada's largest oil and gas producer, has set an ambitious goal regarding greenhouse gas emissions. It has announced that by applying advanced technology, including carbon capture and storage, it will attempt to reduce the emissions from its tar sands operations to effectively zero. A laudable goal.

This reflects what supporters of the oil industry are saying. Bitumen producers are continually reducing the emissions intensity of their product, reinforcing their claim to be an "ethical" source of oil, thereby justifying increased production.

And it sounds like very good news indeed—the oil industry doing its bit to deal with global warming. Even the Pembina Institute, a leading environmental group, calls it "definitely a step in the right direction."

But it's only a part of the story. And a very small part at that. On average, production, transportation and refining only create about 20 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions from a barrel of oil. Production alone creates only seven per cent. Eighty per cent are created by the ultimate burning of fuel in internal (infernal?) combustion engines.

So this isn't quite the good news it might initially seem. Good news to some extent of course—every reduction in emissions is good news. And in Alberta it is especially good news. Canada is one of the top three per-capita emitters in the industrial world and Alberta is the major pollution province, in per-capita and absolute terms, so the province's reputation needs every bit of good news it can get. But even if companies did reduce production emissions to zero this is only tinkering around the edges. All the propaganda emanating from the oil industry and its supporters about reducing bitumen production emissions is so much dancing around the real problem—that eighty per cent.

To do that we must reduce more than production emissions to zero, we must reduce oil production to zero. That will be the real good news.