Journalists, unlike academics, are supposed to know a little about a lot, as opposed to vice-versa. From October, 2018 to February, 2019, I immersed myself in the whole messy issue of the promise, the pitfalls, and the politics behind the Trans Mountain Extension (TMX) pipeline project for a feature story in PIQUE Newsmagazine in Whistler. It’s a big, hairy, complicated issue where your opinion can easily be swayed by a single aspect that you don’t like (“tankers will threaten the whale population” or “enviro groups are funded by Americans.”)
We now know more about certain issues facing our world than ever before, but making an informed decision is challenging because there’s just too damned much stuff to sift through. Here’s my little Harper’s Index of what I found out.
- The disparities in oil consumption between ‘world citizens’ is staggering. As an affluent, car owning Canadian (even though I don’t live in some place that requires plugging in a block heater), I likely consume somewhere in the range of 70 barrels of oil in a year. Over half the world’s population consumes less than four barrels, annually. Note that these include huge, emerging economies like India and the Philippines.
- Raw feedstock can be refined into a vast majority of blends; some of which end up in your gas tank, while others are used for plastics, asphalt and to heat your home. There really isn’t a single aspect of modern life that isn’t touched by petroleum.
- The price of oil fluctuates wildly. When I started researching my story in November, 2018, a barrel of Western Canadian Select crude sat at $10.29 per barrel. Less than five months later, it had skyrocketed to $55.80 per barrel
- Only three percent of the Athabasca oil sands is extracted utilizing the open pit mining, whose press images are most prevalent in the press. Steam assisted gravity drainage, which does result in extensive tailing ponds, is more prevalent.
- Energy costs to extract usable, refinery-ready diluted bitumen remain high both financially and environmentally. Experimental efforts to reduce carbon by-products show some promise but are not yet in wide-scale usage.
- Despite much opposition to carrying dilbit via pipeline, there has been little organized protest about rail transportation; an option that is both more dangerous and more expensive.
- The concept of “dirty oil” from the oil sands was popularized by 350.org, an American-funded environmental group founded by advocacy journalist Bill McKibben. It’s his group – not Canadian funded activists – that was responsible for Barack Obama’s about face on Keystone XL just before leaving office. A reversal of Obama’s executive order—which is quite possible—would probably eliminate the need for TMX.
- Kinder Morgan had the opportunity to route their controversial pipeline south at Abbotsford/Sumas to connect with a refinery at Cherry Point in Northwest Washington. Whatcom County is probably more open to business than Simon Fraser University.
- Albertans are far more pissed off at British Columbians than vice-versa. Aside from education (world class research schools like the University of Alberta) and health care, Alberta has a high wage/low tax economy based on getting oil sands products to market. Only 28,000 people are employed in the mining and oil and gas resource sector in British Columbia, compared to 130,000 in Alberta.
- A superficial read of news headlines around energy and climate change can lead to some absurd contradictions such as “The Global Gas Plunge Set to Curb Emissions”
(Yahoo! News) versus “Global Carbon Emissions Hit Another Record” (The Economist). Choose which half-full glass of natural gas you wish. - Know that “articles” in mainstream news outlets such as the Globe, National Post, Calgary Herald, Vancouver Sun and Huffington Post are often ‘guest editorials’. If you read a story about a large project with social or environmental impact in the business pages, you will often get a different perspective than in hard news.
- There has been ‘pain at the pumps’, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether this pipeline gets built or not. TMX is about shipping dilbit across the ocean to China. The fact that they don’t yet have any refineries to process it is yet another under-reported story.
- The world is living in the Anthropocene, where humans have had an undeniable effect on the health of the planet. Like a garden, we can watch it flourish or like Chernobyl, we can destroy it forever. As the bumper sticker says, “God is watching. Get busy.”
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