As kids and university students head back to classrooms this week, Alberta Oil gets back to bitumen. September's content centers on our annual oil sands report.

*Editor Gordon Jaremko visits the headquarters of Boston-based CERES, short for Coalition for Responsible Economies, to find out why oil sands firms are increasingly maligned in the public eye, and what they can do about it.

*Also on the eastern seaboard, we visit NYMEX, the world's largest trading arena, and delve into the frenzied world of futures trading. File this under little-known fact: when oil prices peaked at US$147 a barrel in mid-2008, trading in paper barrels reached a fever pitch, climbing to 640 million barrels daily. That's eight times the real-world consumption of wet barrels.

*Growth is back on the agenda of the mega-mine projects that started the oil sands story more than a half-century ago. While a more measured pace to development is taking hold in the formerly red-hot bitumen belt, forecast oil sands spending is nothing to sneeze at.

*Knowledge brokers from Ziff Energy Group tell Alberta Oil why gas from the Mackenzie Delta still matters.

*Vern Blinn landed his first job on a rig in 1949. The retired roughneck has been building models of iconic oilfield hardware ever since.

It seems every week another company announces a boycott against Alberta's oil sands. News today that Levi Strauss & Co., Walgreens, The Gap and Timberland have pledged to avoid fuel derived from the sticky black goo otherwise known as bitumen is only the latest attack to hit the province's northern cash cow. Recall the Rethink campaign that disingenuously tarred Alberta's tourism industry, or else think of Whole Foods, the uber-expensive grocery retailer, announcing an oil sands boycott of its own back in February.

"What this signals is the beginning in earnest of the financial war over the tar sands," declared Todd Paglia with Forest Ethics, which organized the latest campaign.

The irony here is criminal. Consider water consumption. It's a sticking point for environmentalists. Oil sands mega-mines are maligned because they use two-to-4.5 barrels of water for every barrel of oil they produce. Not exactly a glistening ratio. But it's instructive to look at these things relatively. How much water does it take to produce one pair of Levi's jeans, for instance? According to Boston-based CERES, short for Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, the garment manufacturer uses a whopping 924 U.S. gallons of water (that's 22 barrels, or 3,498 liters) to produce a single pair of your favorite blue jeans. That figure factors in all stages of the production cycle, from growing the cotton, to manufacturing, customer care and disposal.

Both Levi's and Suncor Energy Inc., owner of the original oil sands open-pit mine, are members of CERES, which is certainly no oil sands cheerleader. "Every industry has issues. Nobody has clean hands - be it sweatshops in China or oil sands tailings ponds," CERES transportation programs manager Carol Lee Rawn tells editor Gordon Jaremko in the September edition of Alberta Oil. "Every industry has its challenges."

Indeed. Check back next week for the full story on CERES and the oil sands. In the meantime, check the label on your pants. You could be wearing an ecological disaster.

Perhaps it's the fizzling of Microsoft of late, but Bill Gates seems to have a lot of time on his hands. He's recently taken to speaking up about energy and climate change. In an interview with Technology Review editor-in-chief Jason Pontin, Gates delves into the prospects for nuclear energy, carbon pricing and energy miracles. Here are a few snippets plucked from that conversation:

On the merits of feed-in tariffs:

The irony is that if you actually look at the amount of money that's been spent on feed-in tariffs and you properly account for it--tax credits, feed-in credits in Spain, solar photovoltaic stuff in Germany--the world has spent a massive amount of money which would have been far better spent on energy research.

On the need for a carbon tax:

If you said to a utility company executive, which is more likely to stay in place: a cap-and-trade thing, whose price will vary all over the map, that will have some international things that will be shown to be a waste of money? Or a tax and a regulatory framework for plant replacement over the next 50 years? We should have a carbon tax. What we owe the developing world is this: we're willing to pay high prices for energy plants above coal and drive prices down the curve so by the time they need to buy them, they don't have to pay the high price.

On the renewable revolution:

Almost everything called renewable energy is intermittent. I have another term for it: "energy farming." In fact, you need not just a storage miracle, you need a transmission miracle, because intermittent sources are not available in an efficient form in all locations. Now, energy factories, which are hydrocarbon and nuclear energy--those things are nice. You can put a roof on them if you get bad weather. But energy farming? Good luck to you! Unfortunately, conventional energy factories emit CO₂ and that is a very tough problem to solve, and there's a huge disincentive to do research on it.

On reducing the overall carbon footprint of the industrialized world:

It is disappointing that some people have painted this problem as easy to solve. It's not easy, and it's bad for society if we think it is, because then funding for R&D doesn't happen.

Academics in Australia - the world's largest exporter of coal - have big plans for renewable power. In a hulking 294-page report, researchers at the University of Melbourne have sketched out a road map for converting the country's energy mix to 100 per cent renewable, baseload electricity in 10 years at a cost of $8 per household per week.

You heard that right. Not a drop of oil, ounce of coal or puff of natural gas. Think electric cars, concentrated solar-thermal plants, wind and biomass. Sound ambitious? Well, it is.

Fully 54 per cent of Australia's current greenhouse gas emissions stem from stationary-power generation. Another 16 per cent are from agriculture, and 15 per cent from transportation.

The authors project electricity demand will top 325 TWh per year in 2020, more than 40 per cent higher than current levels. To meet that demand, they propose a mix of 60 per cent - 42,500 megawatts - concentrated solar-thermal power, 40 per cent wind, and two per cent biomass from crop-waste. This would be combined with energy efficiency schemes and demand-management.

Employing molten-salt-heat storage in conjunction with the solar-thermal setup is a key ingredient in the proposal. The technology allows the sun's energy to be stored as heat rather than electricity. That in turn allows utility-scale baseload electricity to be generated to meet forecast demand peaks.

Currently, 90 per cent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions from energy generation come from the combustion of coal. The zero carbon plan proposes installing a whopping 48,000 megawatts of new wind turbine capacity. Half of that amount would be baseload power because the wind farms would be dotted across 23 geographic regions, the academics predict. Five gigawatts of existing hydropower and an additional 15,000 megawatts of biomass would offset prolonged periods of cloud-cover and low wind in the winter.

The cost? Building a national renewable grid - there are currently three separate ones - across Australia's vast topography would run in the neighborhood of $92.4 billion Australian dollars. The total cost, including technology investments, runs closer to $353 billion. Factor in off-grid installations and you're looking at $370 billion. That's $37 billion, or three per cent of Australia's GDP, each year over 10 years.

Read about the plan here. Find the report here.

Finding any tidbits about Canadian geothermal energy production is a bit like reading a Where's Waldo book. I went looking for some information in anticipation of an article on the alternative energy source I'm writing for an upcoming issue of Alberta Oil. In conversations with the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association (CanGEA) and with a Calgary company building Canada's first geothermal power plant, I discovered there is a dearth of interest in geothermal energy north of the 49th parallel.

This comes as no surprise if you are one of the few firms seriously examining ground heat as an alternative to fossil fuels. Outside of B.C., legislation to encourage geothermal projects doesn't exist. And even B.C., which boasts a Geothermal Act, is a laggard in the start-up sector. The legislation has "been completely ineffective in the sense that they have no power plants," says Alison Thompson, CanGEA's chair. "There's a handful of pieces of land that have been leased out and they just seem to not be able to get their collective act together about going forward with the industry."

The absence of legislation governing subsurface geothermal resources need not be a death blow to the nascent industry. Provinces may not even need it, Thompson says. Countries elsewhere don't have specific legislation for geothermal energy, she points out. Some administer it under water rights. Others use oil-and-gas or mining rights. "At the end of the day it's about drilling holes and producing a hot fluid, which is already done very similarly in these other industries," the association chair says.

What is needed is a supportive legislative framework that promotes renewable power, she adds. "Most people don't even know that they can have geothermal power, and yet we say, 'well what were you thinking? What do you think these hot springs are? They're a very natural manifestation, and that's just the tip of the iceberg."

For a snapshot of international power output from geothermal sources, check out the information from the Paris-based International Energy Agency below:

*Is Big Oil shrinking? Perhaps, writes Eric Lukas over at the Foreign Policy blog, The Oil and the Glory. In the wake of BP's fire-sale of assets, up from an initial $10 billion to $30 billion, Lukas says global heavyweights are increasingly looking to trim their portfolios, "making fewer, bigger bets" and casting doubt on the old growth-through-acquisitions investment strategy. In addition to BP's slimmed-down MO, ConcoPhillips is looking to shed $10 billion is assets, while Shell just last week announced asset sales of $8 billion.

*On another FP note, writer Peter Maass tries to make sense of precisely how much the U.S. spends defending strategic deposits of black gold around the world (spoiler alert: it's in the trillions).

*Meanwhile, there's this from the Economist: "The best hope to reduce pollution from the [oil] sands is probably finding alternative energy sources or cutting consumption." The article here provides few insights into development north of Fort McMurray, but accurately conveys the increasingly polarized passions oil sands development engenders. That is, scroll down to the comments section, where one particularly zealous reader calls another a "dispicable (sic) waste of protoplasm"

*Responding to "concerns from the public and various political leaders" in the U.S., TransCanada Corp. announced today that it plans to cut throughput, albeit marginally, on its proposed Keystone XL export conduit. The proposed pipeline has become a flashpoint for sybaritic Americans keen to wean themselves off foreign oil.

*U.S. researchers are working to find cheaper ways to scrub carbon from fossil fuel exhaust.

Our new content for August is up, and it's brimming with all the usual goodies.

*With Enbridge Inc.'s application for its proposed pipeline to the Pacific now before the National Energy Board, AO editor Gordon Jaremko wonders if it's wise to keep plowing investment into the bitumen belt solely for export to the U.S., where it has become a popular article of faith (endorsed by President Barack Obama) that oil imports must be cut.

*Switching from coal-fired electricity to power driven by natural gas peaking plants won't happen overnight. Coal has a role to play now and in the future, says Atco Group president Nancy Southern. Enmax Corp. begs to differ.

*Growth is back on the agenda for firms in the oil sands. But hold on, sonny boy. Are we headed for another labor shortfall? The Petroleum Human Resources Council of Canada is raising the red flags.

*Just as BP Plc plugs its Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, the fallout from the blowout is reverberating in Canada's Beaufort Sea. But relief wells may not be the best way to plug a runaway formation.

*Imperial Oil Ltd. chairman Bruce March says the company doesn't need an upgrader to make a salable product. So what makes Ian MacGregor and North West Upgrading Inc. so confident? The next generation of upgraders are diversified manufacturing hubs.

*The dying gasps of cap-and-trade legislation in the U.S. could trigger new talks about a tax on carbon in policy circles.

*Is it time to reconsider gross domestic product as a measure of economic well-being? As China and other south Asian countries industrialize, the question is increasingly giving economists pause.

*The end-is-nigh hype surrounding the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (a bottom-up leak, technically) has been overblown. Amazingly, Rush Limbaugh may be onto something.

*The end of emissions-spewing coal-fired electricity, on the other hand, is nigh. At least in the UK. The government there announced on Tuesday that no new coal-fired plants would be built unless they were fitted with carbon capture and storage technology.

*ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell are committing $1 billion to launch a "rapid-response" system to deal with deepwater oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, owners of the ill-fated Macondo well continue to pass the hot potato during Senate subcommittee hearings.

In light of the ongoing saga playing out in southwest Michigan involving a spill of 19,500 barrels of crude oil into the whimsically named Kalamazoo River, a look at the technology used to monitor pipeline stresses and corrosion.

It's hard to see the forest for the tweets these days. Defending oil is rather like sticking up for a certain breed of male who enjoys a bit of battery with his morning coffee. Indeed, nothing short of the Devil's perspiration itself could be a more vilified liquid.

The latest inky blemish to stain the industry's collective hands is, of course, a spill of 19,500 barrels of crude into the Kalamazoo River in southwest Michigan. The ruptured pipeline from which the oil is issuing forth is owned by a subsidiary of Calgary-based Enbridge Inc.

Predictably, news of the breach is being appropriated with gusto by critics of Alberta's oil sands. Perhaps the comparisons are inevitable. A pattern of censure is taking hold. One Greenpeace campaigner this morning called Enbridge the "BP of B.C." Twitter thrums with vitriolic bursts of condemnation in the same vein. As always, industry jumps to its own defense, dispatching company flaks to parrot the corporate line whenever a microphone is near. Meanwhile, plant shutdowns are demanded. The M-word (moratorium) is hauled out of the dustbin. Drilling bans ensue. And as ever, motorists remain unperturbed.

Amid the chorus, scarcely a syllable gets uttered about jobs. Fishermen and shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico have been devastated in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon blowout and sinking. Here's some news: so have rig workers.  That hard-working people actually earn a living digging up icky stuff from the ground rarely earns a mention when birds are covered in sludge.

Emphatically, the point here is not to minimize the damage wrought by big business on pristine wilderness. Incidentally, mountaintop-removal mining is a pretty devastating practice in Virginia, but that's beside the point. We're angry at oil, right? Still, in a world of 140-character tweets and seconds-long soundclips, a bit of balance and perspective is needed. Calamitous climate change, what writer Ian MacEwan called "the hot breath of civilization," is a pressing challenge. But mudslinging and unassailable virtue are not one in the same.

*The U.S. State Department has delayed a decision on TransCanada Corp.'s Keystone XL project to at least the end of the year. Among other requests, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has asked that the State Department consider the greenhouse-gas impact of extracting Alberta bitumen before giving Keystone a regulatory nod.

*Calgary-based Enbridge Inc.'s second-quarter earnings rose to $232 million, or 63 cents a share, from $195 million (54 cents per share) in the same quarter last year. Net income slid to $138 million, or 37 cents per share, from $393 million, or $1.08 a share, in the same period last year. The results come as the company grapples with a pipeline rupture on the Kalamazoo River in southwest Michigan. Approximately 19,500 barrels of oil have spilled along the route that transports crude from Griffith, Ind., to Sarnia, Ont.

*Husky Energy reports a 23 per cent drop in second-quarter profit.

*The largest out-of-control fire in Alberta is being contained north of Fort McMurray. The blaze, which has consumed 3,300 hectares of bush, is being held at bay roughly 13 kilometers northeast of Suncor Energy's Firebag operation.

*Ex-BP boss Tony Hayward's $1.6-million "golden parachute" pales in comparison to the sums given out to other deposed corporate titans. When former ExxonMobil chief Lee Raymond left that company in 2005, he walked away with $400 million, including a $98 million lump-sum pension and use of the company jet.

Interesting news, notes and tidbits from around the web:

*Researchers from Siemens Corporate Technology want to use induction to heat and separate bitumen from sand.

*The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is setting its sights on hydraulic fracturing. The method of cracking dense layers of rock to release deposits of natural gas is under increased scrutiny as companies flock to newfound basins like the Marcellus Shale.

*Forget about the Hoover Dam. Industrial design graduate Tom Broadbent has invented a nifty device that can harvest energy from falling waste water in high-rise buildings.

*Andrew Nikiforuk is on the offensive again. The perennial oil sands antagonist recently joined The Tyee, an independent online news  magazine based in B.C., as a writer-in-residence. This time around, the author wants to know why a Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development abruptly canceled a report on oil sands impacts.

*U.S. Congressman Ted Poe (Texas) is sticking up for TransCanada Corp.'s embattled Keystone XL pipeline. In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Poe writes, "This project is vitally important to the energy security of the United States, and I encourage you to approve the permit without further delay."