The Boomer Chronicles

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Tar Sands and Why You Need to Know About Them Posted: 22 Sep 2011 07:21 AM PDT Tar sands are in the news these days, but a lot of people are tuning it out because they don’t have the basic facts. Tar sands are gummy deposits that are found in a number of places in the world, but the largest one is a tract in Canada (that is the size of Greece!) that is being targeted by the United States as a new source of fossil fuel. Tar sands (also referred to as oil sands) are a combination of clay, sand, water, and bitumen, a heavy black viscous oil. Tar sands can be mined and processed to extract the oil-rich bitumen, which is then refined into oil. The bitumen in tar sands cannot be pumped from the ground in its natural state; instead tar sand deposits are mined, usually using strip mining or open pit techniques, or the oil is extracted by underground heating with additional upgrading. The problem is, getting usable fuel from tar sands comes at astr0nomical expense and environmental devastation, not to mention extraordinary amounts of water, which we can’t afford to waste in this era of  growing drought conditions throughout North America. For the past several months, American citizens have been outside the White House protesting the construction of a new pipeline, called the Keystone XL, which will transport the stuff from Canada down to Texas to be refined. Ruptures in pipelines like this are not uncommon. If this new pipeline goes through and it ruptures, here is just one of the things that could happen: a BP-style oil spill in America's heartland, contaminating the source of fresh drinking water for 20 million people. Instead of rabidly pumping up and processing every ounce of oil or oil-type product, we need to reduce our use of the stuff. That means a major change in lifestyle and energy use. And not on an individual basis. But society-wide. It’s the only way. In my neighborhood, we are becoming a Transition Town. This is a way to enable a local community to provide for many of its own needs. A Transition Initiative (which could be a town, village, university or island etc) is a community-led response to the pressures of climate change, fossil fuel depletion and increasingly, economic contraction. There are now thousands of such initiatives around the world.

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