oil sands

On Thursday morning 11 Greenpeace activists entered Syncrude’s Aurora tar sands operation -- just north of Fort McMurray, Alberta -- to deploy a massive banner that read "World's Dirtiest Oil: Stop the Tar Sands".

I recently came across a new website featuring a product called GLENSOL, which is short for Global Envirokleen Solution.

Not only does it seem like they have created a oil remediation additive that works, but it's enviromentally friedly too. The byproducts of this remediation process are all natural which can be re-used or released into the environment with zero pollutants.

The part I enjoyed the most was the video about the oil remediation process, even though it took a little while to get going.

WASHINGTON, DC, June 12 — The US Senate’s Democratic energy leader does not expect a provision of the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) to restrict sales of oil produced from Canadian oil sands to US refiners, he told a Canadian-US business conference on June 11.

Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said on May 22 the US House adopted a clarifying amendment offered by Rep.

CHICAGO, Illinois, June 10, 2008 (ENS) - In a case that could affect oil refineries around the country, plans by ConocoPhillips to expand its refinery in Roxana, Illinois were sidelined on Friday when an appeal board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency upheld a challenge to the air permit required for the project. The decision sends ConocoPhillips and the Illinois EPA, which had granted the permits for the Wood River refinery expansion, back to the drawing board.

1. Residents of communities living downstream from tar sands operations are experiencing unusually high rates of rare cancers and auto-immune diseases. Dr. John O’Connor spoke out on the occurrance of rare cancer clusters in the community of Fort Chipewyan.

2. The Alberta tar sands are the fastest growing contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Canada at approximately 40% of the country’s emissions.

According to a recent report in the Chicago Tribune, global-warming pollution from oil refineries is expected to soar by as much as 40 percent during the next decade.

As the Middle East has become more unstable, as Iraq has boiled into chaos, other, more unexpected places have flourished, and none more so than Fort McMurray. Five hours' drive north of Edmonton, in Alberta, it has always been a frontier town.  The trouble has always been that it's not conventional crude, easily liberated from the earth, but tar sands (also known as oil sands) - a mixture of sand, water and heavy crude which is much more difficult and expensive to extract.

From the story: The picture tells the story of Liz Moore's visit to Syncrude's Oil Sand operation in Alberta, Canada. She visited the site while attending a family reunion nearby, and came away with the proverbial bad taste in her mouth.