Earlier this year, Luc Bouchard, the Roman Catholic bishop of St. Paul in Alberta, Canada, issued a pastoral letter in which he wrote that the environmental threat posed by the proposed future development of oil sands "constitutes a serious moral problem."
A recent report from the Council on Foreign Relations doesn't address the morality of oil sands development. It concludes that greenhouse gas emissions related to development will pose no climate threat. (Bishop Bouchard addressed a much wider range of environmental concerns, including climate change). However, neither will expanded development be the energy security godsend that its advocates claim. The report, written by Michael Levi, a senior fellow at the Council, concludes that oil sands are "neither critical to US energy security nor catastrophic for climate change."
Oil sands exploitation "will not fundamentally change the global oil picture," the report said. The greatest impact of expanded development would be a diversion of revenues away from adversarial governments, "although this benefit would exist regardless of whether the United States was the ultimate consumer."
The US would also benefit from buying oil from a country that would spend more of those revenues on US goods, the report said. World oil markets would also gain from shifting to supply chains that are less vulnerable to terrorism.
However, US vulnerability to oil price volatility and to price manipulation by OPEC or any large individual producer will not significantly diminish by shifting imports to oil sands, nor will the need for US military commitments in the Middle East decline, the report said.
If global oil consumption and prices were sharply reduced over several decades - "a desirable but difficult-to-promote outcome - the ultimate role of oil sands in promoting security would be much smaller."
As for the impact on climate, oil sands' life cycle greenhouse gas emissions are greater than those associated with conventional oil, the report noted. Current oil sands production produces about 5% of Canadian emissions of carbon dioxide, equivalent to 0.5% of US emissions from energy use. If oil sand production increases as expected and the emissions entailed in producing each barrel are not reduced, CO2 emissions would roughly triple by 2030, according to the report. That would make oil sands "a huge relative contributor to Canadian emissions, but still a relatively marginal one in the US and global contexts."
However, if efforts to impose significant reductions in GHG are realized , the relative prominence of the oil sands "would greatly increase." Should oil sands emissions increase as expected over the next two decades and then stabilize in 2030, while total US and Canadian emissions are required to drop by 80% by 2050, "[O]il sands emissions would then become equivalent to about 10% of US emissions by 2050, representing almost all emissions from Canada at that point. Oil sands' emissions will be thus be critical to deal with in the long term, though not as important in the immediate future.”
The report prompted a response from Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. The report, she said, "fails to account for the costs and risks from locking us into an immensely expensive and complex tar-sands infrastructure that does not make sense for a sharply emissions-constrained future."
Expansion of tar sand oil development "cannot be reconciled with the imperative to reduce the deterioration of our atmosphere," Casey-Lefkowitz wrote. The report is also "oddly dismissive of the broader environmental impacts of tar sands oil development beyond global warming."
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