Gordon Kelly thinks the oil sands could be Canada’s ticket to a clean energy future
Author champions oil patch in new book
“It’s facts and events. What I’m working on is all logic and should go ahead. If the public reads that, they’ll make up their own minds. They’ve only heard one side of the story.”
The trademark streak of reserve in the Canadian national character has allowed a one-sided image of Alberta’s bitumen belt as “dirty oil” to spread by default. “It is time we played a more dominant role on the global stage and not let the kibitzers stop us,” Kelly writes. “For some reason, we are our own worst critics. The world is changing and Canadians have the opportunity to play a leading role.”
Much of the book is a just-the-facts review of the oil sands from the geological nature of the deposits to established production techniques, emerging new methods, environmental hazards and cleanups, and marketing programs. In just a few sentences, he dismantles premises of attacks such as an environmental horror movie called H2Oil, which played at the 2009 Calgary International Film Festival and had a run in independent theatres.
The movie suggests that industry, from oil well drilling in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to Fort McMurray bitumen mega-mines, is draining the Athabasca River and the loss shows in lowered levels of Lake Athabasca as seen on its western shore from Fort Chipewyan. The film echoes more formal environmental criticism from groups such as the Pembina Institute for Appropriate Development.
Kelly points out that the location of Fort Chipewyan is called the Peace-Athabasca Delta for a good reason. Two rivers meet in the region. The Peace River has historically contributed five times more water to the lake than the Athabasca and is disrupted upstream by a 1960s British Columbia power megaproject, the W.A.C. Bennett Dam.
But he has bigger fish to fry than critics who have sniped at bitumen developers for years without slowing them down. He suspects his own tribe of engineers will be much more effective by devising profitable forms of clean energy sources such as hydrogen and solar power. Economic and industrial creativity guarantee that nothing lasts forever – not even oil’s role as the world’s dominant energy form.
Kelly recommends the creation of a civilian counterpart to the 1940s Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb and laid foundations for nuclear power. He calls his brainchild the Alternative Energy Research Project, or AERP for short. He urges the provincial government to make Alberta the field’s world leader by committing $4 billion to a scheme for converting oil sands revenue into a cornerstone of environmental energy technology development.
“If Alberta can take the world’s worst bitumen deposit and turn it into economical gasoline, diesel fuels and plastics, it can take that extra step to do it cleanly,” Kelly writes. The energy province “can use cash flow from the oil sands and the creative research capability of Canada to develop better power sources for the 21st century.”
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