Bishop decries oil sands as immoral

Enviromine

Publishing Date: 06 Feb 2009 2:10pm GMT
Author: Mining, People and the Environment

Luc Bouchard, bishop of the Alberta diocese of St Paul has denounced the region’s oil sands developments, saying they cannot be “morally justified” and calling for a halt to new developments.

The bishop joined environmentalists in damning the environmental performance of Alberta’s sprawling open-pit oil sands developments.

“The concerns environmentalists express are highly credible,” he said in a letter to parishioners.

Oil-sands projects have long been the target of environmental groups, and a report published by the Pembina institute and WWF-Canada last year said projects were failing to meet environmental standards. The report said that on average Alberta’s ten oil sands projects scored just 33% when tested on 20 different environmental criteria in five categories.

Improvements may be close at hand, however, after Siemens Corporate Technology announced it was working on a new, environmentally-friendly process for extracting bitumen from oil sands. The new technique uses electromagnetic induction to improve in-situ leaching methods, which currently require large quantities of water and are energy intensive. Siemens said the induction process is to be tested in Germany this year, before a pilot plant is established in Alberta in 2010.