We all knew that a great deal more R&D funding would be redirected into renewables as the price of crude oil stayed high, right? Well, not really ...... in fact, hardly at all.
Although some of the Big Oil players ARE looking at some renewable energy forms, and indeed, buying up the rights to quite a few patents in this field, the renewables R&D spend pales into insignificance in comparison to what is happening right now in the Canadian oil shale belt.
The extended high crude oil price has finally made Alberta's Black Goo commercially exploitable, and the cost to the planet is ........ even higher CO2 emissions!
"The industry already contributing to climate change more than any other is frantically turning up the heat. The process of refining bitumen emits three to four times the greenhouse gases produced by extracting oil from traditional wells, making the tar sands the largest single contributor to Canada's growth in greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, the industry plans to more than triple production by 2020, with no end in sight. If prices stay high, it will soon become profitable to extract an additional 141 billion barrels from the tar sand, which would place the largest oil reserves in the world in Alberta."
For a depressing read see the full article by Naomi Klein at Rabble News. The black goo rush was recently described by the FT as "north America's biggest resources boom since the Klondike gold rush"
All in all a bit of a one-sided match: Renewable Energies 0 - Big Oil 6
And the winner of the prize for the newest destructive eco-disaster is .......... Northern Alberta.
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