By Katie Kieffer
Image credit: “Oil Sands” by 4BlueEyes Pete Williamson on Flickr via Creative Commons.
Canada supplies about 20 percent of the U.S.’s total imported crude oil and refined products. Roughly half of what the U.S. imports from Canada originates in oil sands. Oil sands are viscous “deposits of bitumen in sands & clay.“
Influential Hollywood celebrities like Avatar director James Cameron are pushing for bitumen production in Canada and advising the U.S. to purchase crude oil from Canada rather than the Middle East. While this may sound like a good idea, a closer look reveals why the U.S. should play in its own “sandbox” before it starts singing O Canada.
Cameron is the guy I would go to if I wanted to produce a blockbuster movie, not to decide how to make the U.S. energy independent. Two of his films were the highest-grossing films in the world: Titanic (2000 – $1.8 billion) and Avatar (2010 – $2.8 billion). This is impressive, but what qualifies him to be an expert on Alberta’s oil sands? That he’s a native of Ontario?
Image credit: “Director James Cameron” by Clare & Dave on Flickr via Creative Commons.
With the exception of a few Canadian hockey players like Vancouver’s Rick Rypien who get a little carried away when playing against U.S. teams, Canadians are a friendly bunch. Certainly, I would feel more comfortable buying anything from Canada than from Saudi Arabia. But, we could avoid heavily relying on other countries – including Canada – if we looked first to our own oil resources here in the U.S.
Even a Hollywood environmentalist like James Cameron admits that the U.S. needs oil. He recently told TIME Magazine, “We’re going to need it regardless no matter how fast you move off oil. We’re not there yet—renewables make up maybe 3% of the grid, even if it’s changing fast. … I’m speaking from a U.S. perspective, and you still need oil—you need it for trucks and airplanes. You need it for fuel.”
Cameron tailspins from Logicville to La La Land when he preaches the hypocritical gospel of “Good Canada Oil, Bad Serbia Oil” instead of promoting the exploration of America’s own oil reserves. Why should we self-righteously pay Canada to “damage” its environment by exporting “more oil and products to the U.S. than it [Canada] consumes itself?” I think we should look into the resources in our own backyard before we go running up to Canada:
1.) ANWR
I dedicated extensive research in this blog post to showing why the U.S. should drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) known as the “1002 area.”
2.) Utah’s oil sands
Approximately 32 billion barrels of oil exist in Utah’s oil sands. Utah’s oils sands are “hydrocarbon wet,” meaning they would require a different extraction technique than Canada’s, which are “water wet.” Current extraction technology would yield greenhouse gas emissions that are unacceptable to the U.S. per Section 526 of the Energy Independence and Security Act.
The Act states that the U.S. government may not access Utah’s unique oil because doing so would “produce more greenhouse gas emissions than would traditional petroleum including oil sands.” However, as I blogged here, there is scientific evidence that one primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is “…not a pollutant but the hope for a greener planet.”
Why is James Cameron traveling to Canada and offering “constructive observations” on oil production rather than traveling to Utah in search of sustainable extraction methods for Utah’s oil sands?
3.) Continue exploring deep-water drilling opportunities
There is reason to believe that the current Administration misrepresented the scientific community when it recommended a six-month ban on new deep-water drilling in May of 2010. Scientists now say they didn’t approve the Obama Administration’s drilling moratorium. The Associated Press reports:
All seven experts [scientists] asked to review the Interior Department’s work expressed concern about the change made by the White House, saying that it differed in important ways from the draft they had approved.
“We believe the report does not justify the moratorium as written, and that the moratorium as changed will not contribute measurably to increased safety and will have immediate and long-term economic effects,” the scientists wrote earlier this year to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sens. Mary Landrieu and David Vitter. “The secretary [Interior Secretary Ken Salazar] should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is correct, but he should not be free to use our names to justify his political decisions.”
Image credit: “Alberta Tar Sands NWF Flight Oct 2010 #1″ by NWFblogs on Flickr via Creative Commons.
