Oil Sands Question and Response (OSQAR) Blog

How to keep things rolling in Fort McMurray

Do you cringe when you think about your daily commute to and from work? Ever secretly wished all the roads were just for you? You’re not alone. For many of us, bumper-to-bumper commutes are a painful reality of our work week. Believe it or not, if you don’t live in Alberta’s Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB), your rush hour commute might seem like a Sunday pleasure cruise compared to what this community endures most days. 

Bumper-to-bumper commutes, a reality for most Canadians, are also common in the oil sands region. Photo credit: iStockphoto

While those who live in the oil sands region enjoy abundant job opportunities and the nation’s highest per capita incomes, many get caught daily in one of Canada’s worst gridlocks, be it on the roads or in the air.  

Over-stretched infrastructure and social services are an unfortunate consequence of a decade of rapid growth. Development brings prosperity for communities, but it also places tremendous pressure on roads, housing, schools, and hospitals (something OSQAR has touched on before). 

Why is it so challenging in Wood Buffalo? For one thing, despite being larger than Nova Scotia the region has only one major highway. Wood Buffalo’s Highway 63 carries the heaviest loads per kilometre in the country, even though it’s still not entirely twinned. 

Getting in and out of the region by commercial air service can also be difficult. Fort McMurray’s airport is the busiest of any small or medium-sized city in Canada. According to the Fort McMurray Airport Authority, the facility handles more than 700,000 people each year, even though the terminal was designed for 235,000 (a number it reached – and passed - back in 2005). The airside building is designed for a peak-hour maximum of 200 passengers, but it already needs to handle at least 300, and ideally 400. 

As key players in the oil sands region, Suncor and industry are committed to working with government and other stakeholders to help address and resolve transportation issues. 

And befitting the can-do attitude of Albertans, stakeholders aren’t just sitting around waiting for someone else to do something. 

To better accommodate oversized trucks, a new five-lane bridge has been built across the Athabasca River flowing through Fort McMurray. The structure can hold more than 12 times the weight of a typical bridge.  

Diversified Transportation Ltd. is operating buses that deliver thousands of workers to and from oil sands sites every day, significantly reducing the number of vehicles on the road, improving safety and lowering the environmental impacts. 

The airport has started a rebuilding program that will finally triple the terminal’s size. When finished, it will be able to handle up to one million passengers a year. 

There’s renewed interest in a Calgary-Edmonton-Fort McMurray rail corridor, effectively linking the oil sands hub with Alberta’s two largest cities to the south, as well as talk of reviving transport on local rivers.  

It’s a great starting point for the recently-created Athabasca Oil Sands Area Transportation Coordinating Committee. Featuring representatives from the municipality, the province and industry, the committee’s mandate is to seek ways to further improve roads, transit, rail and air traffic. (The group’s first chair is Suncor’s own Heather Kennedy, an oil sands business veteran and long-time Fort McMurray resident.)  

The new committee is a step in the right direction, as we think transportation, like other challenges created by oil sands development, is best tackled in a collaborative way. 

We’re encouraged by what’s happening on the transportation front. It is progress like this that gets us to practical solutions rather than daydreaming about jet packs, Floo Networks and time-travelling DeLoreans (although, admittedly, they’d be pretty cool.)

Sculpting a greener energy future: easier said than done

Nowadays you have be a modern Spartan to enjoy January; the clanging steel of fitness clubs, lettuce seemingly at every meal, and frugal, no-frills living are the tell-tale signs that the holiday binge is toast.

Like our New Year's resolutions, achieving a greener energy future will take time and discipline. Photo credit: iStockphoto

In addition to ambitious individual resolutions, many of us also head into a new year with ideas and plans about how we can collectively make the world a better place. Reducing or even eliminating fossil fuels is often seen as a way to improve life on Earth, especially with the threat of climate change continuing to hover over us.
 
Whether we’re seeking a trimmer waistline or carbon-free energy, we, as conditioned by human nature, want immediate results with the least amount of pain and discomfort possible. Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that getting the results we want typically takes lots of time and effort.
 
The irresistible lure of food, a comfy couch and endless hours of reality television is the lethal triumvirate that thwarts our efforts to drop pounds.
 
So what are the barriers to shedding fossil fuels?
 
Cost and energy density are a couple of significant factors. While renewable energy has obvious environmental benefits, the reality is that most forms of it don’t yet match fossil fuels when it comes to cost and the amount of energy they generate.
 
The institutional financial advisory firm AltaCorp Capital Inc. took a crack at comparing renewable and hydrocarbon energy sources in a comprehensive research paper called Renewables vs. Hydrocarbons: The Energy Reality (PDF).
 
Though AltaCorp acknowledged that hydrocarbons can’t be used indefinitely, its analysis of 27 energy sources found that alternatives such as wind and solar were several times costlier than conventional options like oil sands and crude from the Middle East. And while there’s no gain without pain, there’s also no pain quite like dollars and cents. Check out the slides below to see how energy sources stack up with respect to cost and energy output, consumption and CO2 footprint. 

Renewables vs. Hyrdrocarbons

View more presentations from Suncor Energy

This cost gap is why the world’s governments, not private enterprise, are being tapped to stimulate the renewable energy investment needed to ease the transition away from hydrocarbons. Subsidies are, and will continue to be, an essential part of renewable power development, which is one major reason why we can’t expect to shed our fossil-fuelled chubbiness overnight.
 
In its World Outlook 2011, the International Energy Agency predicts that renewables in global primary energy consumption will increase from 13 percent of the mix today to 18 percent in 2035, with the growth underpinned by subsidies worth $250 billion in 2035, up from $66 billion in 2010.
 
Not only are current forms of renewable energy costly but operating them on a scale needed to match rising energy demand is impractical, as we explored in a previous OSQAR.
 
Even renewable energy’s most ardent supporters realize ditching fossil fuels can’t be done overnight. Consider Greenpeace’s Energy Revolution: A Sustainable Energy Outlook for Canada, a recently released report on renewable energy sources and their potential for replacing nonrenewable ones.
 
The report suggests that renewable sources of energy would rise from 15 per cent of Canada’s primary energy demand today to 25 per cent by 2020 and 74 per cent by 2050.
 
Increasing renewable energy’s share in the mix is something we all want sooner rather than later. We believe transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable sources can happen if there’s open dialogue, full participation by all stakeholders, and recognition that trade-offs will be required.
 
What’s needed is a national strategy that takes into account the social, economic and environmental implications of such a shift.  
 
And like our New Year’s resolutions, sculpting the greener energy future we want without radically compromising current lifestyles will no doubt take a lot of discipline and innovation. 

Celebrity involvement in the energy debate: style or substance?

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If you saw media coverage of last year’s White House protests against the Keystone XL pipeline, you were more likely to learn that Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) and the mermaid from Splash (Darryl Hannah) are all against it, than to get any deep insight into the project’s complex design and potential social, economic and environmental implications.

Celebrities can be effective at drawing attention to social and environmental issues. Photo credit: iStockphoto

Hollywood has a long tradition of speaking up on political questions of the day. From Charlie Chaplin, who attacked Nazism and made an entire movie parodying Hitler, to George Clooney who almost single-handedly ensured Americans recognized the suffering of people in Darfur, film star involvement can help raise an issue’s profile and engage a wider public.
 
We should admire people who are prepared to put their reputations, and perhaps their careers, on the line for controversial causes. Jane Fonda did it in the 1960s, joining the movement against the Vietnam War. Dozens of actors, writers and directors did it in the 1940s and 1950s, refusing to cooperate during U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigation of “Un-American” elements in Hollywood.  
 
Environmental and animal rights groups have been quick to recognize the value of having a celebrity or two front their campaigns (particularly if the cause is fashionable in the circles in which the stars move.) They know even a B-lister can mobilize at least a few thousand supporters and help attract the attention of television news producers and newspaper columnists looking to feed the mass media beast.
 
We should not decry this – everyone is entitled to a point of view. But it is worrisome when media-savvy celebrities go from being viewed as endorsers of experts’ positions to being publicly perceived as actual subject matter experts.
 
The celebrity-as-an-expert trend is benign when actors are simply expressing personal views on issues of conscience, such as human rights. But it becomes more alarming when the issue is technically complex and has huge ramifications for the economic development of nations. The public isn’t well served when information about something as important as energy is reduced to a couple of simplistic sound bites. 
 
Take Hollywood’s contribution of YouTube videos to the anti-Keystone XL campaign, for example. Not only do the videos vary widely in eloquence and accuracy, few offer any solutions to the challenges of meeting global energy needs in the decades ahead.
 
The degree to which celebrity involvement influenced the U.S. government’s ruling to defer its decision on Keystone XL is anybody’s guess. But with energy demand poised to rise dramatically in the coming years, the Keystone XL debate and others like it are critical discussions that require everybody’s participation, not just those immortalized on celluloid (though as Woody Allen once said, “I don’t want to be immortalized through my work, I want to be immortalized by not dying.”)
 
Unfortunately few if any celebrities ever seem to side with energy development, which is a pity. Personally, we think “Bieber for Bitumen” has a really nice ring to it. (Justin, if you are reading this, our phone number’s below).

Will CCS help reduce oil sands GHG emissions?

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The Alberta government has placed a large importance on carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction technology, committing $2 billion to advancing four large-scale demonstration CCS projects in the province.

Shell’s Scotford upgrader processes bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands and will be the site of the proposed Quest CCS Project. Photo credit: ICO₂N

But can CCS actually help reduce oil sands emissions?  The simple answer is potentially. And while CCS may prove useful in certain applications, the technology is not a silver bullet but rather one of many methods being explored to curtail GHG oil sands emissions
 
How does CCS work? It involves capturing GHG emissions from large industrial facilities before the particles reach the atmosphere. The captured emissions are transported through pipelines for permanent storage in deep, secure, porous underground rock formations where a barrier of impermeable cap rock and natural trapping mechanisms keeps the gases stored forever.
 
Because of high costs and large-scale infrastructure requirements, CCS technology is best applied to large concentrated emissions sources. While oil sands development involves multiple emission sources, few of them are actually large concentrated emission sources. CCS appears to fit best in reducing emissions in oil sands upgrading, and, to a lesser extent, in situ oil recovery.
 
Upgrading is where CCS will first be used in oil sands development. Costs vary by facility, but are in the same ballpark as they are for using CCS on coal-fired electricity plants. According to ICO₂N, a group of Canadian companies developing CCS in Canada, CCS on upgraders is expected to initially capture about 35 percent of a facility’s emissions as opposed to 90 percent-plus for CCS at coal power plants. Of the four Alberta projects, two involve CCS on upgrading facilities – at Shell Quest and North West Upgrading.
 
As CCS technology improves and costs decline, it may be used in other facets of oil sands operations, including at in situ facilities. Current pilot projects are testing the technical viability and safety of CCS at operating in situ sites. One such project is being proposed by the CO₂ Capture Project and led by Suncor. This project is an oxy-fuel combustion initiative on a once-through steam generator at Cenovus' Christina Lake Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage facility.
 
While government and industry are generally supportive of CCS technology to help curb oil sands GHG emissions, it gets mixed reviews within the environmental community. For example, Greenpeace, the David Suzuki Foundation and World Wildlife Fund oppose CCS as it’s seen as extending the use of fossil fuels at the expense of investment in renewable energy development. Other groups, such as the National Resources Defense Council and the Pembina Institute, support CCS as one possible technology, although both organizations have voiced concerns about the overall costs and pace of reducing GHG emissions. 

Concerns aside, CCS is one of many potential methods in the tool kit for use in lessening the environmental impacts of oil sands development.

'Twas the night before Christmas: A Suncor parody

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(With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore)

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the site,
The conveyor belts were whirring, all through the night.
The hard hats were hung in the lunch room with care,
In hopes that the bus back to town would soon be there.

This tree was planted at Suncor's Wapisiw Lookout on September 23, 2011 and represents the five millionth tree planted on our oil sands site.

The operators were nestled all snug in their rigs,
While on the lookout for dinosaurs during their digs.
And the upgrader running steady and fine,
Producing synthetic crude to put in the pipeline.
 
When out in the boreal forest there arose such a clatter,
Guests sprang from our camp to see what was the matter.
Away to the shuttle they flew like a flash,
Jumped into their seats and put their coffees on the dash.
 
The mine spotlights shining on the new-fallen snow,
Gave the impression of warmth, though it was 90 below.
When, what to all wondering eyes should appear,
But a bunch of our stakeholders with special Christmas beer.
 
There stood Robert Redford and his coifed lid,
We knew in moment it was the Sundance Kid.
He flew up from Utah on his private plane,
And he told us he thought oil sands were a pain.
 
Beside him stood somebody in business attire,
Who was here to find out if our share price could go higher.
Our operations are reliable and we’re flush with cash,
But we’re not immune to a Euro market crash.
 
Also in the group were community reps,
Who recognized our contribution and positive steps.
We create jobs and a strong tax base,
Although traffic to our site is never a horse race.
 
Off to the side and all dressed in green,
Were groups advocating energy that is clean.
Their voice is important in the debate,
As we work for an energy future that is great.
 
Standing at the back donning their safety gear,
Were our mine staff celebrating another terrific year.
They all contribute in their own way,
And keep the barrels flowing day after day.
 
Connected to the proceedings by video conference link,
Our in situ employees arrived in a blink.
Working hard to help us prosper and grow,
Their faces were red with a steam-assisted glow.
 
Front and centre and shaking everyone’s hands,
Were the officials who govern our lands.
They pass the laws that keep us in line,
And sometimes assess us the occasional fine.
 
Seated near the group in their heated trucks,
Were our business partners on site to make a few bucks.
They’re part of the team and help get things done,
So we meet energy demand now and in the long run.
 
Perched atop a heavy hauler was old St. Nick,
Wishing a happy retirement to Suncor’s Rick.
With a message to OSQAR readers not on site,
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"

 

From us to you, please accept our best wishes for the holiday season.

OSQAR will be taking a break for the holidays. Watch for our first edition of 2012 the week of January 9th.