I was first introduced to the tar-sands phenomenon via a National Geographic article from 2009. A spruce-covered wetlands along the Athabasca River in northern Alberta, Canada - a landscape not hugely dissimilar from our own -had been turned into something closely approximating the Western conception of hell.
The land was gouged and barren, in some places 100 feet of soil and organic matter skinned away, leaving an oily black vista stretching to the horizon. As desensitised as I'd become to images of environmental damage, this one shocked me on a visceral level.
It's been called "the world's dirtiest fuel" and until recently, tar-sand deposits were considered too expensive and too destructive to mine. Today, as the price of traditional oil rises and technology makes profitable extraction more viable, the vast tracts under Canada, and smaller deposits in Russia, Kazakhstan and the Congo are considered part of our global oil reserves.
The tar sands industry would like to see its activities rebranded into the sexier "oil sands", which implies something more palatable to the public. However, it's a dirty, sticky business: tar sand is a naturally occurring bitumen deposit, a semi-solid sludge of heavy crude oil mixed with sand and clay.
Because it doesn't flow, the industry uses strip mining for extraction, rather than traditional oil wells, and then melts the oil out of the sand, generally with steam. It takes two tonnes of sand, and five barrels of water, to produce a single barrel of oil - with the wastewater going into "tailings ponds" for decontamination. Coated with rafts of floating bitumen, these ponds are so toxic that they kill birds that land on their waters.
