The Dominion - energy

"Green Bitumen?!"

Sandra — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:39:24 +0000

Nuclear reactors in the tar sands

SASKATOON—What do you get when you cross a nuclear reactor with a hydraulic shovel-full of tar sands? The answer, according to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, is "Green Bitumen."

The brainchild of the nuclear industry, this novel concept of deploying small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to replace natural gas is being sold as a solution to the tar sands' reputation for producing the largest carbon footprint on the planet. Nuclear is being touted as an environmentally friendly, "clean" energy source for the extraction process. But in order to make that claim, one must overlook the substantial carbon emissions in the nuclear "fuel cycle," from mining to ultimate disposal; the risks of weapons proliferation; the toxic radioactive footprint; and the legacy of highly radioactive waste left behind for many generations to come.

Several key players have expressed interest in deploying nuclear reactors in the tar sands, including: Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), a federal Crown corporation; SNC Lavalin Nuclear and its subsidiary Candu Energy Inc.; Bruce Power, one of Ontario's largest nuclear power generators and its parent company Cameco, the world's largest supplier of uranium; Toshiba, builder of the Fukushima Daiichi 3 power plant; Westinghouse; Aitel; Gen 4 (formerly Hyperion); and General Atomics. The governments of Canada, Alberta and Saskatchewan have at times all actively promoted this agenda. Also involved is the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), a major US Department of Energy nuclear research facility.

The nuclear industry, government and academia are pitching "Green Bitumen" to the tar sands industry and anyone else who will listen. Dr. Warren Bell, founding president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, sees wide and grave implications for the environment and public health should this message resonate with its target audience.

"The federal and provincial governments are intent on tying the tar sands to nuclear power. Their forlorn hope is that the putative 'greenness' of the latter will counteract the overwhelming 'blackness' of the former," Dr. Bell told The Dominion.

Nuclear reactors have been proposed for three different functions in the tar sands. They could produce high-pressure steam to heat up the underground deposits, inducing bitumen flow from Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) mines. They could supply electricity to the mines. And they could generate electricity to produce hydrogen from water. The hydrogen is used to "upgrade" bitumen into a product similar to conventional crude oil.

But attention is currently focused principally on high pressure steam production. Single-mine electricity requirements are too small to justify reactor purchase, and current hydrogen production methods—from natural gas—are much cheaper. Since the high reactor temperatures required for high pressure steam production exclude conventional designs, the nuclear industry will look to universities for taxpayer-subsidized research and development based on as-yet unproven, "fourth generation" SMR designs.

A reactor would serve one tar sands mining complex, producing at most 30,000 barrels/day; a 375MW-thermal reactor would provide sufficient steam. The same size of reactor would be rated at about 150MW if used to generate electricity, with the other 225MW lost to the atmosphere. For comparison, modern full-size reactors generate 1000 to 1500MW.

The first sign of a concerted effort towards nuclear reactors in the tar sands came in 2006, when the Alberta Energy Research Institute, the energy-technology arm of the provincial government, announced plans to participate in a study with the industry to define nuclear options for the tar sands. This was followed by a private presentation by AECL and Energy Alberta Corporation—a company later linked to Ontario's Bruce Power—to the provincial Conservative caucus in 2007. Two days later, the Alberta Conservative convention passed a resolution to explore using nuclear power plants to assist oil sands development.

In 2008, the provincial government established the Alberta Nuclear Power Expert Panel to study the proposals. Three of its four members were drawn from the oil and nuclear industries. In 2007, with support from their federal counterparts, provincial government officials had already entered into discussions with the Idaho National Laboratory and had reached an agreement to study ways to use nuclear energy in Alberta's oil and gas industry.

The Peace River Environmental Society and other concerned citizens began an intensive public campaign to resist Bruce Power’s application to build a large-scale nuclear reactor in Peace River country, in north-western Alberta. They argued that the application and review process was riddled with a lack of transparency and integrity, undermining its credibility.

"It's a sad commentary on our society when government institutions meant to protect and inform us become puppets of the industries that harm us. Their obstruction of the truth compromised the best interests of Albertans for the benefit of an industry that has created massive debt and contamination for Canadians for the past forty years," Peace River anti-nuclear activist Pat McNamara told The Dominion in an interview.

Faced with effective public opposition, Bruce Power finally withdrew its application in December 2011. But by then the focus had already moved on to Saskatchewan.

Even before the election of his Saskatchewan Party government in 2007, Brad Wall had decided to embrace a nuclear future. "Small reactor technology is coming on fast and may present an opportunity for our province to develop our oil sands in an environmentally responsible way as the new technology produces much-needed steam as well as energy," Wall said in May 2007, six months before his election as Premier, according to a Saskatchewan Party Caucus news release. In 2008, Bruce Power made a pitch to SaskPower, a provincial Crown corporation, extolling the benefits of a large-scale nuclear reactor in Saskatchewan, with the potential to export electricity to the Alberta tar sands and beyond.

The Uranium Development Partnership, a Saskatchewan review panel comprising university and industry representatives, was keen on moving the nuclear agenda forward. Its report with 20 recommendations to "revitalize and capture growth opportunities across the uranium value chain" was released in April 2009 and followed by a public consultation process over the summer months. Just as had happened in Alberta, the Saskatchewan government had already signed an agreement with the Idaho National Laboratory, in March 2009. According to a Saskatchewan government news release, the Memorandum of Understanding would provide "a mechanism for the government and INL to consider research and demonstration projects on a variety of energy sources and resources, including uranium, nuclear energy, heavy oil, oil shale and oil sands."

Public reaction and opposition to the nuclear proposals was swift. The Saskatchewan government ultimately had to retreat from the Bruce Power proposal, but then pursued a different strategy from Alberta. Public funds were made available for nuclear research and development at the University of Saskatchewan. Largely outside public purview, and in close collaboration with the University administration, the Canadian Centre for Nuclear Innovation (CCNI) was established in 2011 with $30 million of government seed money, as was reported in Briarpatch earlier this year. In the CCNI Business Framework, the government establishes that CCNI must meet expectations for nuclear industry enhancement over the next seven years. In a linked move, the Hitachi business group was also funded to conduct "research into the design and feasibility of small reactor technologies," according to a 2011 Saskatchewan government news release.

In the short-term, nuclear reactors cannot compete with natural gas in the tar sands, but there is much dispute over the extent of gas reserves, adding uncertainty to plans for rapid gas-fuelled tar sands expansion. Industry experts worry that by 2030 there might not be sufficient natural gas to fulfil requirements, according to a 2006 Oil Sands Experts Group Workshop report by Len Flint. Studies continue to explore just when nuclear might become a viable option.

Irrespective of the economics, environmental journalist Andrew Nikiforuk told The Dominion that using nuclear power to produce bitumen is an absurd plan. "It's an insult to basic energetics and thermodynamics," he said.

This is not the nuclear industry's only target. In Saskatchewan, rapid, minimally regulated expansion of the oil, gas and potash industries will massively increase electricity consumption. SaskPower forecasts an 83 per cent increase in heavy industry's consumption by 2019, with 3750MW of new generating capacity required by 2033, citing nuclear as a long-term option, post-2023. SaskPower's grid management methodology would favour smaller (200 to 300MW), modular applications of existing reactor types. Hitachi has proposed to adapt a small conventional reactor design under the Saskatchewan agreement.

It is also important to recognize that the conventional power industry—nuclear, fossil fuels, pipelines and electricity—is becoming increasingly integrated. Along with Cameco and BPC Generation Infrastructure Trust, TransCanada Corporation is a one-third owner of Bruce Power. Its proposed Keystone XL pipeline represents an important synchronicity of investment between oil and nuclear expansion. SNC Lavalin is already active in the tar sands, and dovetailing that business with their Candu nuclear interests could be a next step. SNC Lavalin now also owns AltaLink, the private electrical company operating most of Alberta’s electrical grid. Planned and existing tie lines into Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Montana will enhance that export capacity.

Some argue that the Western Energy Corridor proposal, designed to export electricity across the border into the United States, is an even bigger opportunity for nuclear expansion in Alberta and Saskatchewan. This explains the keen interest of the Idaho National Laboratory in collaborating with government and industry in Canada. INL sees potential for nuclear reactors in western Canada to fulfil future U.S. energy demand. It is not, however, clear how any nuclear reactor could be built without public subsidy.

But the tar sands, perched atop the federal agenda, remain a much-desired prize. SMRs constitute one of very few technologies that tar sands corporations can use to misleadingly promise a smaller future carbon footprint. Even if ultimately non-viable, the argument serves to promote continued rapid expansion of tar sands extraction.

While European countries such as Denmark and Germany are increasingly moving to a renewables-based future, few North American utility and grid management companies are working to overcome the technical challenges involved in making that transition. Unless this changes, many regions are left with a choice between coal, gas and nuclear. The high greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels provide the nuclear industry with an opportunity to promote itself and revive its flagging fortunes despite its prohibitively high price tags.

David Geary, an anti-nuclear activist in Saskatchewan, says there can be no "Green Bitumen" in an environmentally sustainable future.

"Nuclear energy is not clean or green – it uses up huge amounts of fresh water, routinely spews out numerous pollutants and carcinogens into the air and water, and leaves behind a legacy of highly toxic, long-lived wastes," he told The Dominion.

Time will tell whether the organized struggles against well-funded vested interests in western Canada will overcome the proposed publicly-subsidized proliferation of small nuclear reactors in the tar sands or anywhere else. The battle between truly sustainable energy options and the "Green Bitumen" of the conventional energy industry continues.

D'Arcy Hande is a retired archivist and historian, living in Saskatoon. Dr Mark Bigland-Pritchard is a Saskatoon-based applied physicist working as a sustainable energy and green building consultant.

Green Bitumen?!

Island Hopping With Emera

Miles — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 09:58:00 +0000

Barbados is the latest Caribbean island to feel the Emera squeeze

HALIFAX—On a small island north of Venezuela, 4,500 kilometres from Halifax, Barbados Light and Power (BLP) recently issued a news release. Energy use on the Caribbean island has hit a low not seen since 1974.

“Some people are now simply just turning off all the electricity in their homes, especially when they're not home,” says Carson Cardogan, a Barbadian ratepayer. “They're pulling out everything. Every plug. Including the fridge. People are living virtually in the dark, in order to not pay Barbados Light and Power the hefty electricity bills.”

While the average Canadian might applaud such a downward shift in power consumption, this is not a question of Barbadians “going green” by choice. It is the work of Nova Scotia’s Emera, BLP's new owner.

Emera, the Nova Scotia-based company, moved fast onto the scene in Barbados, purchasing a 38 per cent share in the largely nationally-owned BLP in May 2010, and another 41 per cent in January 2011. When shares in BLP were trading at $12 on the Barbados stock market, Emera offered BLP shareholders $25 per share—an offer they could not refuse. A few dissenting voices, on call-in programs and social media panels, urged caution against selling off the national power company to a foreign interest, but the deal went through unencumbered.

Later, an investigation by the Fair Trade Commission (FTC), Barbados' regulatory body, suggested that BLP shares were devastatingly undervalued, and should have been priced in the $40 to $50 range.

Writers at “Barbados Underground”, one of the nations' most read independent media sites, suspected something was amiss with the deal. The FTC, as regulator of BLP's power rates prior to the sale to Emera, would have been well-informed of BLP's assets and net worth. To emerge post-sale saying that Emera had purchased a more valuable company than they thought they had is suspicious indeed.

This isn't Emera's first Caribbean purchase. The company already has a controlling interest in the Grand Bahamas Power Company, the monopoly service provider to about 20,000 customers on the island of Grand Bahama. Purchased in 2009, its relationships on the island of Grand Bahamas have been anything but easy. Operation Justice Bahamas (OJB), a grassroots organization, has gathered over 5,000 signatures from disgruntled customers who have cried foul over skyrocketing power bills.

OJB's actions forced the Bahamian government into an ongoing investigation into Emera's business practices, including hundreds of allegations of overpricing, “guess-timation,” and destructive power surges. Sarah MacDonald, Emera's chief officer in the Caribbean, suggested that difficulties in meter-reading were related to the fact that over 8,000 Bahamians did not have a postal address, an allegation that OJB dismisses as a “slap in the face.”

OJB is hoping the governmental investigation is the first step towards a class-action lawsuit against Emera.

“They are, in my words, driving the people into poverty. And they are causing people to lose business,” says Troy Garvey of OJB.

Emera also owns a 19 per cent equity interest in St. Lucia Electricity Services Limited (LUCELEC). While Emera’s involvement in St. Lucia seems to be developing at a slow pace, the situation on Barbados is unraveling quickly.

In Barbados, public allegations of exorbitant power bills, based on incomprehensible calculations, are running rampant, and representatives from industry agree. Sir David Seale, chairman of RL Seale & Company, one of Barbados's largest rum bottlers, has publicly railed against Emera, calling the current situation “unacceptable for industry.” Seale has had to divert company money towards developing new energy infrastructure, and has shifted to diesel generators in an effort to get off the Barbadian grid.

Meanwhile, the government, in an attempt to keep electrical power flowing into some of the more impoverished homes in Barbados, instituted a plan in October 2011, known as Energy Cost Mitigation Assistance (ECMA). The ECMA is a one-off grant of $5 million for welfare-recipient Barbadians, which was created to offset the global increase in fuel costs that are supposedly responsible for BLP's steady rise in power bills.

Before Emera purchased BLP, there was no apparent need for an emergency-style government fund for the nation's poorest to pay their power bills.

Emera’s electricity rate increases, be it in Nova Scotia, on Grand Bahamas or in the Barbados, are all approved by a “third-party” regulatory body, and are thus granted some veneer of legitimacy. In Barbados, that regulatory body is the Free Trade Commission (FTC). In Nova Scotia, the regulatory body is the Utility and Review Board (UARB).

In Barbados, Malcolm Gibbs-Taitt, founder and director general of Barbados Consumer Research Organization, has brought into question the link between the FTC and the Barbados Securities Commission, the body meant to regulate the Barbados Stock Exchange. Both are chaired by Sir Neville Nicholls. The term “regulatory capture,” by which a regulatory agency meant to serve the common good is instead co-opted by private interests, applies here: one individual is overseeing BLP's sale, and also overseeing BLP's requests for rate increases (read: profit).

“My problem with the Fair Trade Commission is that it does not seem to have the ability to get the proper information before it,” says Gibbs-Taitt, “[or] to share that information with those that are involved in the process, to the extent that we can be reasonably assured that what it is doing in the names of the people, the consumers, [is something where] you could say, 'This is a job well done.'”

A similar instance of regulatory capture is at play in Nova Scotia.

Brennan Voegel, former Energy Coordinator for the Ecology Action Centre, notes that Peter Gurnham, largely responsible for the UARB's decisions on NSPI's rate increase requests, was formerly a lawyer in the service of NSPI.

“The major problem is that [NSPI] is guaranteed a rate of return...which allows them to usurp more money out of Nova Scotians,” says Voegel. “They have to make money, but there's very few industries in the world today that still enjoy that enshrined right to profit. And if it were an open market, like it should be, then electricity provided at the lowest cost, with the greatest degree of efficiency, would be the product that people would be choosing.”

The relationship between the UARB, the Nova Scotian government, and NSPI, which Voegel calls “the golden triangle,” has worked well for Emera's top brass. Executive salaries and bonuses have never been higher, with CEO Chris Huskilson taking home over $3 million in 2011. A new corporate head office on the waterfront in Halifax, a structure currently under construction, is slated to cost between $30 million and $40 million.

Executive salaries and bonuses aside, Emera's new-found role as Caribbean power boss begs the question: What exactly is afoot in the islands? Is this a case of classic Canadian snowbird syndrome? Or is a grander scheme in the works?

All of Emera's Caribbean purchases produce the vast majority of their power by burning oil or diesel —the weakest link in Emera's control of the situation. The company is not in the oil refinery or shipping business, and so is beholden to global market trends. Emera, however, is in the gas pipe building business, and already wholly owns Brunswick Pipeline, a 30-inch, 145-kilometre natural gas pipeline in New Brunswick.

Plans for an inter-Caribbean gas pipeline, with gas sourced from Tobago, have been brewing for several years. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez initially encouraged a pan-Caribbean oil pipeline, to run oil from Venezuela, but the Tobago bid for a natural gas pipeline appears to have won out in the minds of investors.

At the time of writing, there was a flurry of activity in the Tobago project: international investors were found after several years of relative dormancy. The company with the lead in the project, Eastern Caribbean Gas Pipeline Company, shares at least one member of its board of directors, Dr. Trevor Byer, with LUCELEC’s board.

If Emera were to involve itself heavily with the construction of an inter-island gas pipeline, it would eliminate one more middleman—the distributor—from its electricity monopoly in at least two Caribbean nations. Whether this gas pipeline materializes and, more importantly, what its impact will be for Emera's Caribbean clients, remain to be seen.

“People are crying out every day” because of the skyrocketing power bills in the Barbados, says Carson Cardogan. “They're writing letters to the newspapers and the call-in programs. And it's having a very deleterious effect on the lives of many Barbadians.”

For the moment, Bahamians and Barbadians, and Nova Scotians, find themselves beholden to Emera's bottom line, a situation that to some—such as the pulp mill owned by Abitibi, and the one formerly owned by NewPage, and their hundreds of out-of-work employees—has already become untenable. Nova Scotians certainly remember that two of NSPI's largest industrial clients, prior to massive downsizing and bailouts in the case of Abitibi, and bankruptcy in the case of Newpage, made very public mention of the fact that escalating power bills were driving them to ruin.

While critics of the two companies suggest mismanagement as the more likely cause of their dire straights, it does beg the question, in Nova Scotia and beyond: Is Emera simply bad for business?

Miles Howe is an editor with The Dominion and a member of the Halifax Media Co-op.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Bridgetown, Barbados

Extreme Extraction

stephlaw — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:03:49 +0000

Oil production plans could reshape Morocco's economy and environment

RABAT, MOROCCO—Many well-known voices trying to address the global climate crisis have posited that less-developed countries—those without a full-blown industrial base—can skip industrialization all together and transition away from fossil fuels. If that is achieved, development in those countries would ideally result in the construction of infrastructure suitable for a post-fossil fuel society.

But if Morocco is any indication, the opposite scenario appears more likely to happen. Instead of proceeding with climate-friendly energy developments, Morocco is poised to begin extracting crude oil from unconventional deposits—the dirtiest fuel available. Mining rock for oil in Morocco would leave massive craters in post-fossil, green energy hopes.

Morocco, like Jordan and Israel, is moving towards using the most carbon intensive fuel base on earth. This move is supported by present, and projected, oil prices that make synthetic crude from oil shale profitable on a near permanent basis. Technology has become cheaper while the price of oil has gone up dramatically. Recent industry estimates indicate that oil can now be extracted from shale for approximately US$40 per barrel, while the average price at an American pump is US$94 per barrel.

With global oil demand slated to grow, Morocco is set to become an unconventional oil producer through mining oil shale and converting it to mock crude oil in a fashion similar to Canadian tar sands development, but borrowing on shale technology from Brazil. Morocco also has contracts to use Estonian technology to mine and burn oil shale directly for domestic electricity.

Estonia is one of a few countries in the world that has ongoing oil shale currently in operation. The Tangier deposit of oil shale in the north of Morocco is likely to see Eesti Energy-owned Enefit of Estonia work to mine this shale directly for domestic electricity generation, which would treat the kerogen shale more like a cousin of coal rather than an ancestor of oil.

Petrobras, the Brazilian state-owned oil company, has developed a technique of extracting oil as well as gas from oil shale, and has been involved in this process commercially since the early 1980s. A partnership between Petrobras and TOTAL energy of France has been developing towards shale-to-oil mining at the Timahdit deposit, a deposit much larger than Tangier, approximately 240 kilometres southeast of Rabat, Morocco’s capital. Petrobras would be the main operator of the Timahdit mine, but both world energy majors will share the costs and profits.

However, there is one persistent problem for both these projects: water. Even without proposed oil shale mining and in-situ developments, Morocco has a serious potable water problem.

To operationalize oil shale in Morocco, water would need to be sourced from nearby the Timahdit deposit. Throughout the country, waterways are already becoming silt-ridden as erosion slowly manifests as a result of another ecological tragedy in the area: illegal timber harvests.

Some environmental journalists, like Mohammed Attaoui, have recently landed directly in the crosshairs of the Moroccan Kingdom. Attaoui was imprisoned by the Moroccan government after he investigated ongoing illegal timber marketing and exporting. Although Attaoui was officially charged and convicted in March 2010 for the extortion of 1,000 dirham (approximately US$120), critics maintain Attaoui was set up in a ploy timed immediately after his research into the country's “cedar mafia” had been published. He was handed a two-year sentence for his alleged crime.

Deforestation, destructive in its own right, is without doubt one of the major factors furthering the water crises of Morocco. But if the water needs for running a major mining operation are appended onto the existing crisis, the prognosis for the country's environmental health gets ever bleaker. The proposed mine at Timahdit happens to be in the same region as two national parks: the Ifrane National Park, which is already under threat from the illegal timber harvest, and Haut Atlas Oriental, which is home to tens of thousands of small farmers who rely on the area and its habitat for agriculture and subsistence.

The illegal timber harvest is the primary threat to the macaques, the last remaining large population of monkeys in northern Africa. Primarily living in the Ifrane National Park, macaques used to be common throughout the Mahgreb but are now endangered by loss of habitat elsewhere and by the shrinking forest. The only place outside Morocco where they live is in the small and shrinking Djebel Babor Nature Reserve on Algeria's coast. According to The Morocco Board News Service, the region is also home to more than 200 forms of plant life not found anywhere else.

Oil extraction is but another burden in a region defined by an already fragile environment. Between the three proposed sites for shale oil development in Morocco, early projections indicate that 50,000 barrels per day of mock oil could be produced for conversion into various fuels within a few years. (This figure does not include electricity generation where shale is burned in a similar fashion to a coal fired plant.)

That estimate includes the Tarfaya deposit near Morocco's border with the nominally independent Western Sahara, which is still occupied by Moroccan forces. Tarfaya has also just seen the completion of an in-situ pilot project constructed by San Leon Energy of Ireland, a smaller player with some operations in the continental United States. Building up Tarfaya has already meant the construction of major highways in less populated parts of southern Morocco to allow for the transport of supplies and materials for the project.

Morocco is on its way to becoming a testing ground for unprecedented oil shale extraction. “The environmental issues in places such as Colorado are not an issue in Morocco,” John Buggenhagen, San Leon Energy’s vice-president of exploration, told Petroleum Economist.

This article is the third in a four-part series examining unconventional oil deposits in the Middle East and North Africa. The series was originally published on the Media Co-op.

Questions? Comments? Email us at info@mediacoop.ca.

Morroco map shale oil

Oil in the Desert

stephlaw — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:48:38 +0000

Will water be sacrificed to oil in Jordan?

AMMAN, Jordan—In March of 2011, The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan jumped headlong into unconventional oil extraction, and signed a deal with Karak International Oil (KIO), a subsidiary of Jordan Energy and Mining Limited (JEML--a British company), for the commercial mining of oil shale approximately one hour’s drive from the capital of Amman. Unlike most countries in the region, if you fill up your gas tank in Jordan, you are using imported oil— but the Kingdom is touting a future when extreme extraction will change that, and soon.

Jordan is one of the countries most likely to bear the harshest impacts of climate change, and least suited to dive headlong into the most destructive forms of energy yet devised. Walking the streets of Amman, however, one gets the sense that the government has already decided the country will serve as a launching pad for American interests. The entire city is oriented towards the American troops, engineers, and others who stop off on their way to and from Baghdad, Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq transformed Jordan without the dropping of a single bomb overhead. New oil shale proposals could promote a similarly intense kind of change with an absence of popular input—but perhaps even more discreetly.

The main oil shale deposit designated for exploitation in Jordan is at Al Lajjun in the southern Karak governorate, and the lease has a 35-square-kilometer radius. This project is expected to produce commercial crude for refining within five years, maxing out some years after that at 60,000 barrels of mock crude per day. By way of comparison, the entire nation consumes an average of 200,000 barrels per day.

Part of the project’s construction and know-how will be imported into Jordan from the Athabasca region of Canada via Thyssenkrupp Group of Germany. Thyssenkrupp has pledged to build strip mining operations there based on their existing work in Alberta's tar sands mines—the largest existing industrial project in human history.

Elsewhere in the country, Royal Dutch Shell operates under a 100-per-cent-owned subsidiary called Jordan Oil Shale Company (JOSCO). JOSCO also has long-term development plans for oil exploitation in Jordan that are expected to come online no sooner than 2021. Shell/JOSCO have exploration rights to large segments of the country. Shell will also be bringing technology from their operations in Alberta, Canada—including the huge Albian Sands mine.

It's not just Shell and Thyssenkrupp that are coming in with the know-how. So too are Petrobras and TOTAL SA Energy, of Brazil and France respectively. Petrobras has long since operated an oil shale mining and conversion to oil and gas plant. TOTAL has multiple unconventional oil shale and tar sands plays around the world, some operational.

Oil shale slated for extraction in Jordan is for local electricity (not synthetic crude production), by Eesti Energia of Estonia. Estonian electricity has been provided almost exclusively by oil shale mining and burning for several decades. Eesti Energia is now looking into providing technology and constructing electrical plants from shale in not only Jordan, but also in Morocco. Estimates of a recoverable 40-billion barrels of mock crude exist in Jordan, in a total of 26 different deposits.

“We depend 96 per cent on importing our energy from outside of Jordan. It's basically coming from Saudi Arabia, from Iraq and from Egypt,” said Basel Burgan, the head of the Jordanian Friends of the Environment—a group that, among other issues, is in opposition to possible nuclear development in the country on economic and environmental grounds.

“We had depended for a good time on the Egyptian Gas that was cheaper than heavy fuel, but unfortunately the Egyptians have been bombing the pipeline that's sending gas through Sinai to Jordan because it's connected at the same time to Israel,” he said.

Jordanian Friends of the Environment has yet to take a firm position on oil shale.

Power needs for synthetic oil production are vast, and could coincide with a brand new nuclear power plant expected to be announced by French nuclear powerhouse Areva. The amount of water needed for cooling nuclear reactors as well as heating oil shale to extract petroleum is exceedingly high.

With regards to the water needed to run nuclear plants, Burgan says the Jordanian government “claims they are going to take this grey water and do tertiary purification which is a very costly plan, about $800 million [US], and eventually it will produce good water available to be used in a reactor.”
Burgan went on to explain how all of these projects may in fact rely on one another, and even on further regional integration with Israel:

“Some people have said that Jordan will end up sending electricity to Israel. [...] I have read only that Hashemite University, located in the area proposed for the plant site (north of Amman ~40kms) has signed an agreement with Colorado University, which already has an agreement with Ben Gurion University on the same project to build up some kind of desalination plant inside the Hashemite University with modern technology for purification and desalination. We say that all of these agreements and projects are basically depending on the Jordanian nuclear reactor because any desalination plant or station would need massive energy, and the energy would be available from a nuclear reactor.”

Jordan possesses, at best, the fourth smallest water to population ratio on the planet. Israel, which is also poor in terms of water, has already constructed five desalination plants, one of which is the largest on the planet. In the area where KIO plans to construct a large oil shale mine, many traditional Bedouins live off the land and source their water through deep wells in an extremely arid environment just east of the Dead Sea. Damage to the water table through use for extraction, or through contamination resulting from toxic waste produced by the mining process could have disastrous health effects on local people and ecosystems. The same would be true of air quality.

One of the other possibilities for increasing available water supply is a massive industrial project euphemistically known as the Red-Dead canal. This canal comes with a plan to pump sea water over 200 kilometers from the Red Sea to fill up the ecologically unique Dead Sea (where water levels are currently dropping at an alarming rate) and provide sea water for desalination projects and industry to both Israel and Jordan. Essentially Red-Dead project would transform the Dead Sea into little more than a reservoir for Israel and Jordan to use for industry, and would likely require the deepening of 1994 normalization agreements signed in the shadow of the increasingly sidelined 1993 Oslo Agreements, themselves signed as a pre-cursor to a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Jordanian water is used in varying amounts by Israel, depending on the season, under the terms of the '94 normalization between the two states. The water situation in Jordan is so bleak that the Red-Dead Canal is endorsed by groups that oppose nuclear power, including Friends of the Environment, in the hopes that this massive Israeli-Jordanian project could supply the population with potable drinking water even as climate change dries out the planet ever further.

The Jordanian government has announced open bids for nuclear plans, while the United States—backed by Israel—demands the uranium be converted to fuel somewhere other than the Kingdom out of a desire to prevent technological and research development. For obvious reasons, official confirmation or details about Israel's continued uranium research at their Dimona nuclear facility in the Negev desert, where Israel's nuclear arsenal was almost certainly developed, are not forthcoming. Israel has also declared their desire to have a nuclear power plant in the Negev—the hot, arid desert lands west of the rapidly drying Dead Sea.

If normalization were to include collaboration on a plan to extract crude from shale, industrial mega-projects would stand in as a regional response to dwindling water and energy supplies.

With the Red-Dead Canal plan still in play, the possibility of collaboration and increasing development on both sides of the Dead Sea looks likely.

This article is the second in a four part series examining unconventional oil deposits in the Middle East and North Africa. The series was originally published at http://mediacoop.ca

Israel Jordan Shale Oil Map

Apartheid Oil

stephlaw — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:58:40 +0000

Crude oil trapped in shale could transform Israel into energy powerhouse

JERUSALEM—Major offshore gas strikes in 2009 and 2010 may soon convert Israel into a gas exporting country with self-sufficient energy. But perhaps more important than the gas under the sea is the mock crude trapped in husk dry sands and rock hard shale, reserves which could push Israel into the upper echelons of recoverable oil on the planet. Israel’s reliance on others for energy supplies has long been a weakness, both economically and militarily.

What promises to be the most energy intensive form of oil recovery on the planet could reinforce Israel's military might, while presenting a new threat to scarce water resources and the climate.

New estimates show that there are 250 billion barrels of recoverable mock (or synthetic) crude oil, possibly even more, in locations throughout Israel. By way of comparison, Canada has just under 200 barrels of oil, including recoverable tar sands while Saudi Arabia is said to have 260 barrels.

The announcement of these major oil finds comes on the heels of the discovery of the contested Leviathan offshore gas field in the Mediterranean Sea, estimated to hold between 16 and 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The Leviathan field was discovered by Texas-based Noble Energy Inc. in June 2010. The discovery is disputed by Lebanon, which brought a complaint to the United Nations alleging Israeli slant drilling off the Lebanese coast following the 2006 aerial war. Further complicating matters is the other major natural gas play in the region, which lies beneath the recognized maritime territory of the Gaza Strip.

“Israel [will] never buy gas from Palestine,” declared Ariel Sharon in 2001, after the Palestinian Authority signed 25-year development leases with European energy companies. Palestinian control over their own gas was challenged in a 2003 Israel Supreme Court case that has yet to be resolved.

British Gas Group was close to striking a development deal on the Gaza deposit, and was planning to pipe gas through to Egypt when, in 2006, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair allegedly intervened to prevent sending the gas south, in the interest of Israel. In the following year, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert issued a proposal to buy the $4 billion worth of gas found in the Gaza deposit, with $1 billion in profits going to the Palestinian Authority (PA). The Israeli cabinet approved the proposal, and bypassed the newly-elected Hamas government in Gaza altogether.

The proposal eventually fell through because various military and security advisers warned a gas deal with the PA would pose a security risk to Israel. Soon after, British Gas Group closed their office in Israel and announced on their website that they were “...evaluating options for commercialising the gas.” Perhaps on the advice of retired high-ranking Israeli Defence Forces officials, British Gas Group ceded their field license, so as to no longer involve the Palestinian Authority.

Israeli interest in the Gaza deposit didn’t end then. In November 2008, the Israel Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of National Infrastructures instructed the Israel Electric Corporation to enter into negotiations with British Gas with hopes of purchasing natural gas from British Gas’s offshore concession in Gaza, according to a press release by Boycott Israel UK.

These instructions came approximately one month before Operation Cast Lead, or the Gaza War, and might have played a role in stalling an official Israeli attack on Gaza.

"It is possible that the prospect of a major natural gas transaction with the Palestinians has been a factor in the Israeli cabinet's refusal to launch a Defensive Shield II operation in Gaza,” wrote retired Israeli Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, only months before the Operation Cast Lead bombing of the Gaza Strip.

Together with the Leviathan deposits, the natural gas fields off of Gaza's shores represent reserves that could easily meet Israel's internal electrical energy needs and turn the Zionist state from net importer to an exporter of energy. But the importance of the gas deposits may pale in comparison to the more recent development of technology for recovering tar sands and shale oil. In fact, given the massive energy inputs required to extract oil from shale, the Leviathan and Gazan gas fields may become an integral part of supplying the energy for this massive heavy oil project.

Israel's massive oil shale deposits vary in form from petrified kerogen rock to bituminous formations that have the texture and appearance of the tar sands common to places like Alberta, Canada.

Israel Energy Initiatives (IEI) announced in March 2011 a project to transform shale into oil. The project will use a combination of technologies already in use in Canada's tar sands and newer conceptual technology developed in Colorado's vast oil shale deposits. If it proceeds, the shale oil extraction in Israel project could permanently alter the political and atmospheric climate of the Middle East.

IEI is a subsidiary of the much larger Israeli Data Technologies (IDT), a corporation that already dominates Israel's economic landscape and is led by IDT Chairman Howard Jonas. Along for the ride on this venture are media mogul Rupert Murdoch and former US vice-president Dick Cheney, along with many other notables.

Approximately 15 per cent of the landmass of UN-defined Israel overlays oil shale deposits. In fact, Israel has already exported their know-how to the Alberta tar sands: Ormat, an Israeli firm, has set up shop with patented energy technology in Alberta under the name Opti. Opti teamed up with Nexen in Canada to launch an in-house technique of burning the waste gunk produced through extraction in order to provide energy for the extraction operation itself. At the end of July 2011, Opti (and their interests in Alberta's tar sands) was sold to China National Offshore Oil Corp.

Not unlike the seismic shift that kicked the long dormant Alberta tar sands into high gear following the war on Iraq and cumulative rise in oil prices that coincided with the Katrina disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the latest announcements out of Israel are staggering.

The oil shale proposal that is closest to approval is a short drive southwest of Jerusalem, a pastoral area of Kibbutzes and small villages that historians believe was the backdrop for the biblical battle between David and Goliath. The area doesn't feel anything like the oil boomtown of Fort McMurray, Alberta, or even anything close to much of the Middle East, but more like parts of western Canada's Okanogan Valley.

In the sunny backyard of a house in a gated community, Lia Tarachansky of the Real News Network interviewed Chagit Tishler about the proposed oil shale project while myself and a Palestinian man from a Jerusalem neighbourhood listened and drank tea.

“It's the biggest license even given to a private company in Israel,” said Tishler, who works with the organization Save Adullam, which is made up of local residents who oppose the IEI pilot project. The license was granted under the Oil Law, said Tishler, which is essentially a free entry law dating from 1952, which prioritizes oil and gas exploration over farms, parks or historical sites.

“The area could be ruined completely. This area is the last area in the centre of Israel that remains an open area and a green area, and has a lot of archaeological sites that are important not only to Israelis but to the rest of the world,” she said, before listing historical sites in the vicinity. Known as the Elah Valley, the area was re-settled only a couple of years after the Nakba in 1948 by primarily North African Mizrahi Jews. To this day, they and others use the valley for food crops and Israeli wine.

IEI's planned operations in the Elah Valley include digging five kilometres of trenches through farms and vineyards to expose the shale rock, which would then be heated until the kerogen and other organic materials held inside it are bled out of the rock, producing a basic crude substance. Much like tar sands bitumen, this substance will still need to go through an upgrading process before refining.

If carried out as planned, IEI’s project would constitute one of the least energy efficient forms of oil production ever devised. Three to five gigawatts of electricity would be used to produce a single barrel of shale-based oil, according to Save Adullam. Heating the shale, which takes place for months at a time, could release at least 15 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. No other extraction process in conventional oil or even tar sands involves a heating process this extensive, nor is any as carbon intensive. This carbon release takes place even before refining, let alone consumption.

Regardless, for Israel, these reserves represent a local supply that cannot be blockaded. IEI states that the petroleum from this shale produces a light synthetic crude nearly perfect for converting to jet fuel.

Thus far, groups like Save Adullam who wish to stop this project have failed to make alliances with other communities living with the threat of oil shale extraction. The focus of Save Adullam is to demand a repeal of the 1952 oil law. Their allies are inside the Knesset and others within the Israeli state, including the Jewish National Fund (JNF).

Though the first lands slated for large scale development projects have religious and biblical resonance, there are also mining projects that will spread across the traditional territory of Bedouin Palestinians in various parts of the Negev Desert. The majority of the surface oil shale, which is similar in composition to the Albertan tar sands, sits in the northern part of the desert. In addition, mining for oil shale, which is burned for electricity, has already taken place in the deep south of the desert, close to Eliat.

The Mishor Rotem Basin is on the west bank of the Dead Sea, and an oil shale deposit straddles both sides of the border between the state of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In 2006 the JNF concluded that Israel was using 25 per cent more water than was sustainable (this includes the almost 90 per cent of the water diverted from Palestinians in the West Bank).

In Zionist settlements and recognized Bedouin villages in the Negev, cancer rates are already considerably higher than in the rest of the Jewish state. Pollution from oil shale developments in any form would undoubtedly contribute to increasing overall contamination. In addition, the bulk of the Negev desert is also a training ground and “free fire zone” for the air force and military—already a massive environmentally destructive force at play.

Israel's laws make it nearly impossible for non-Jewish citizens of Israel to exact equal rights in almost any field, even within Israel. Bedouins are seeing these problems deepen—primarily upon the orders of the JNF, and carried out by riot squads and the IDF—with JNF-led “making the desert bloom” projects, attacking and bulldozing entire villages (some over 25 times in the last year) to facilitate “forest planting”; and forced re-settlement into government planned townships.

Bedouin communities traditionally linked with the land who wish to stop the intrusion of oil shale and its toxic consequences will likely need to think beyond strategies that simply try to undo laws written by the Zionist state, and they aren't likely to find allies in the JNF.

And in yet another parallel to Canada, the vast offshore gas deposits claimed by Israel—mainly but not exclusively the Leviathan field—could serve the same vital role for energy input of oil shale developments that natural gas plays in the Athabasca tar sands. Israel already has a water crisis, but it looks like it might see fit to exacerbate that problem in the push for energy independence.

This article is the first in a four part series examining unconventional oil deposits in the Middle East and North Africa. The series was originally published at http://mediacoop.ca

Israel Jordan Shale Oil Map

Witnessing the Tar Sands Dead Zone

dawn — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:48:05 +0000

Asserting the need to heal

FORT MCMURRAY, AB—In the face of the enormous devastation that is destroying forests across northern Alberta, a peaceful group of people are steadfastly asserting the need to heal the land and waters. On June 25, 2011, the second annual Healing Walk for the Tar Sands brought together Indigenous people, Keepers of the Athabasca, elders, children and supporters, who walked 13 kilometres through the heart of where Syncrude and Suncor extract bitumen on a massive scale.

Bitumen, a tar-like substance that holds petroleum, sits below what the industry, in an Orwellian turn, calls “overburden”—not forest

The destruction we saw is so vast it goes far beyond the visible horizon. The urgent need for healing is evident to anyone who visits this barren expanse. People from many places came to support and join in—including activists who participated with Zapatista Indigenous communities and the movement in Oaxaca, Mexico. Together they chanted, “Zapata vive! La lucha sigue!”

The Healing Walk for the Tar Sands was led by elders such as Lillian, a Cree woman, and Violet, an 83-year-old elder and the oldest woman in the community of Fort McMurray First Nation. These elder women possess a wonderful sense of humor and sharp minds, and with other elders, guided the traditional prayers, smudge and ceremonies. This walk faced the enormity of the land stolen from Indigenous peoples that is now destroyed, lifeless, and empty save for ugly scarecrows called “bit-u-men” to keep out the birds from its poisoned soil. Horrid continuous booms from sound cannons scare the birds from landing in the enormous reservoirs of toxic waste. We marched beside the machinery of destruction, the surreal gigantic Tonka trucks, cranes and pipes. The air pollution, a putrid stench, gave a headache to many of the people who participated in the healing walk.

The day was rainy with occasional bursts of sun, but the walkers were not deterred by the weather. A couple walkers had brought protective dust masks, remembering how terrible they felt last year after the six-hour walk, their lungs absorbing toxic dust from the tar sands. However, it was not appealing to wear wet masks so we continued, mostly mask-less, through the rain along the shoulder of Highway 63, accompanied by a heavy police presence.

This walk was started by people heartbroken by what has happened to their traditional homelands. One of the organizers, Cleo Reece, helped to start the Memorial March for the Murdered and Missing Women when she lived in Vancouver years ago. She spoke of the murdered and missing waters in northern Alberta: an eerie, disturbing connection between the violence against Indigenous women and against Indigenous land. Colonization is not a thing of the past; it continues today in virulent, violent forms and materializes in the increased rates of cancer found in communities downstream from the tar sands.

Resistance and commitment to peace also continue, as they have for the past 500-plus years. This is a form of power that is based in love for community, a community of the living that includes not just people, but bears, eagles, rivers, wind and forests. It is a deeply humble, peaceful power that stands in ethical contrast to the forms of power that greedily exploit and forcefully violate the land and those who live on it. It is a power that cannot be bought or sold because it is freely shared, residing in a respect and a grief for the land that gives us life.

We began and ended the day at the Nistawoyou Friendship Center in Fort McMurray where a feast for the walkers had been prepared by a chef with a joyful laugh and a team of dedicated volunteers. At the closing circle, Cree Elder Lillian Shirt was presented with tobacco in gratitude for her leading the day’s ceremonies, and she shared with us stories of survival and creativity.

We learned a lot from the tar sands healing walk and from visiting the surrounding Indigenous families, some who live in crowded old trailers, accessible by unpaved, muddy roads. The living conditions on some of the reserves are not unlike those in poor communities in Latin America.

Where are the economic benefits of the tar sands to these communities? What have they gained from these industrial projects? Witnessing the poverty, health problems and environmental destruction in person helped us respond to these questions. A huge economic gap remains between the living standards of Caucasian and Indigenous communities. Indigenous communities are marginalized in Canadian politics and are fighting institutional racism as their long-term interests are undermined.

On the walk, an elder weighed the cost of lost culture, water and foods and asked what all this destruction has been for. The question points to the global interests that have developed the Alberta tar sands in order to sustain a privileged way of life for some at the expense of others. We had travelled from Vancouver, a landscape dramatically different from the tar sands wasteland but which is nonetheless endangered by the latter's economic grip on land. Our Pacific Coast is threatened by proposed pipelines, with their inevitable spills, and a rapid increase in tanker traffic. In an era of climate change, those of us who live in urban centres cannot afford the disconnect between our cities that reap the temporary benefits of this destruction and the Indigenous homelands that have been desecrated. Through global waters, winds, and ethical human relations, we are linked with the people who are witnessing the eradication of their boreal forests, traditional hunting grounds and once-pristine waters.

On the edge of the dead land and toxic reservoirs, wild flowers, forests and Indigenous families live in trailer homes. Life here is simple, humble and warm, filled with good humour and jokes. Inside, Indigenous artwork on the walls portrays wolves, traditional carvings and pictures of ancestors and grandchildren.

In this community, women, men, children, young people and elders resist their displacement and speak up about the destruction of their land, water and wildlife.

“Giving up is not an option,” said Dene Suline Elder Warrior Brian Grandbois from Cold Lake, Alberta. Brian’s community is struggling to protect Berry Point at English Bay in Cold Lake, the land where they hold ceremonies and sacred burials, smoke fish and gather medicinal plants. This sacred land is threatened to become an RV park by ministerial order. Indigenous peoples of the area have set up their peace protection camp with tipis, tents and campfires, even though police are pressuring them to leave. Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and capitalism are killing Indigenous peoples, destroying our planet, La Pachamama—our Mother Earth.

That the pollution from tar sands extraction projects has spread to affect the waters of the Athabasca River and Fort Chipewyan is no secret. Beginning in the 1990s, these waters became unsafe to drink, and people are sick as a result of their toxicity. These polluted waters empty into the Arctic. This is a fact of hydrology. Tar sands pollution as a source of acid rain in Saskatchewan is a meteorological certainty. Airborne pollutants are also reported to be concentrating in lake water in neighboring Saskatchewan, reducing the availability of certain fish species.

While the ailing of these once-healthy waters is cause for alarm, corporate negligence has been responsible for at least three recent pipeline spills in Canada and the US. In July 2010, Enbridge spilled 3.1 million litres of oil into Tallmudge Creek and the Kalamazoo River, Michigan. In May 2011 in the Plains Midwest, 4.5 million liters of oil were spilled in Lubicon Lake Cree territory, the homeland of Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a young woman from the Lubicon Cree Nation who spoke eloquently at the Friendship Center. She described the horror of experiencing 28,000 barrels of oil spilling right beside her family’s homes, in the largest oil disaster in Alberta since 1975. In June 2011, Enbridge was also responsible for about 1,500 barrels spilled near Wrigley in the Northwest Territories. This last spill is said to have been kept out of waterways, but still seeped into the soil.

Horrific spills are not the only danger posed by industrial activity in Northern Alberta. In December 2010, a gushing saltwater aquifer at Shell’s Muskeg River operation raised questions about ground water contamination. This incident was preceded by another round of duck deaths in October 2010 in a Syncrude tailings reservoir. It’s a tragic irony when cultures that see water as something that comes from a tap have to learn about the interconnectedness of the earth’s waters through violent corporate operations that destroy Indigenous people’s homelands and cultures.

The Second Annual Healing Walk in Alberta’s Tar Sands was deeply inspiring. In the midst of massive greed and destruction, a community gathered to transform ground zero into a place of solidarity and social change. The call for healing is compelling, as simple and as necessary as breathing clean air and drinking clean water. The walkers shared an understanding—respect for ecological integrity must come first.

Aidee Arenas subscribed to the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona, Christine Leclerc organizes enpipeline.org, Choo-kien Kua is an artist and Rita Wong is a poet. They are all based in Vancouver. This article was originally posted on the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Tar Sands Healing Walk

Tar Sands Healing Walk II

Small Town Power

Tim McSorley — Fri, 13 May 2011 05:27:02 +0000

A community with energy to spare

HALIFAX—“I can get quite overwhelmed and pessimistic at the state of the world, and I get incredibly angry at our government, which seems to be intentionally ignoring its moral responsibility for the state of Canadian industry,” says Wilf Bean, a resident of Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia. “With [federal environment minister] Peter Kent saying that he’s not going to pass any legislation which restricts tar sands development...It’s absolutely irresponsible.”

Bean, a veteran social justice campaigner and adult educator with the Coady International Institute, explains his decision to become the secretary of Colchester Cumberland Wind Fields (CCWF), a small, community-owned company on Nova Scotia’s North Shore.

“Getting involved in something locally, with local people, and trying to build a community that is attempting to live out some alternative...It’s necessary to my own sanity,” says Bean.

With 125 local shareholders, CCWF has raised the capital to build its first 0.8-megawatt wind turbine, scheduled to be up and running by August of this year. It will produce “about the amount of power Tatamagouche [population 900] uses,” says Bean.

Through an arrangement with electricity provider Nova Scotia Power (which has a monopoly in the province), the wind energy produced by the turbine will feed into Tatamagouche’s substation, which provides electricity to the community. This means that once the turbine is functioning, the company’s “vision of community-owned renewable electricity generation” will be a reality, Bean says.

The community-based aspect makes the project distinct, explains David Stevenson, CCWF’s president. “It’s very rewarding for individuals to have a sense of connection to their own power, and I think we’ll value it more in the long term,” says Stevenson. “All of our power will stay within this area.”

Bean and Stevenson say the North Shore community, already close-knit, is being brought together on yet another level by the wind project.

“There is that pride, that sense of...being part of something,” says Stevenson. “We had a public meeting at the hall in September...There were people there from the Department of Energy, along with local people, and the expression that was given back to us [by the Department] was, ‘Boy, you sure had people on your side.’”

Stevenson and the directors of CCWF raised money through a CEDIF (Community Economic Development Investment Fund), a tax-incentive mechanism created by the provincial Department of Finance to promote investment in local business. As more than 90 per cent of Nova Scotians’ investments into RRSPs leave this province for the Toronto Stock Exchange, a CEDIF means people have better incentive to “[put] their retirement funds in our company,” says David Swan, engineer and manager of the turbine project.

The community-based structure and cleaner-than-coal energy are what led Renate Hempel, a local heritage interpreter, to invest in the wind turbine project. “I was very intrigued by the idea to support sustainable energy that at the same time wouldn’t be owned by a big corporation,” says Hempel.

Hempel admits to having some reservations about the project. For instance, the tax-credit mechanism that financed the project means that the incentive to invest is only there “for people who pay a certain amount of taxes,”—high-income earners, she says. “It’s community-owned, but for people who pay high taxes.

“For some of my neighbours in Tatamagouche, it wouldn’t make any sense for them to invest...their taxes are minuscule” because of their low incomes, says Hempel. “I’m having a little bit of a hard time with that…It’s not for everybody.”

Tracy Glynn, a lecturer in environmental studies at St. Thomas University who campaigns against the environmental and social effects of importing “blood coal” from Colombia to the Maritime provinces, sees the project as a positive step toward cleaner power in Nova Scotia.

But, she adds, it’s important to look beyond small-scale projects like this one and work toward “replac[ing] the capitalist system, which is inherently anti-environment.” Profit, she says, cannot be the only motive driving solutions to the climate crisis.

CCWF is a for-profit business, but one that bills itself on its website as part of a “response to the challenges of the centralized energy systems that resulted from neo-liberal philosophies”—that is, the philosophy that large-scale privatization is the most efficient (read: profitable) way to provide people with energy.

Many people in Tatamagouche glimpsed the impacts of that problematic system in 2008, when Jesus Brochero, a union leader representing workers from the Cerrejon mine in Colombia, visited the community. Cerrejon provides coal to the Maritime provinces via Nova Scotia Power.

Brochero spoke of the myriad hazards mineworkers in Colombia face. Earlier that year, a fellow union leader at the mine, Adolfo Gonzalez Montes, was “tortured and killed at his home,” says Glynn. He was one of 2,510 unionists murdered in Colombia in the last 10 years.

“In the Maritimes, we clearly see how capitalism has merely shifted ecological problems…through the sourcing of cheap, dirty, blood coal in Colombia for our energy consumption,” says Glynn.

David Swan is quick to note that those problems are catching up to us.

“It’s only in the last 200 years we’ve had this concept of ‘I will live better than my parents,’” says Swan. “We may have to go back to a more steady-state lifestyle, a mindset of ‘I won’t have more than my grandparents.’”

Despite her reservations, Hempel is quick to note that she believes the positive aspects of the wind turbine project far outweigh the negative.

“Overall, I think it’s great,” says Hempel. There are “open meetings with everyone, it’s very involved, very transparent.”

And, despite the small scale of the project, Wilf Bean emphasizes its place in the bigger picture.

“At least we’ll be using some clean power source,” Bean says, “and cut[ting] down a little bit on Colombian coal.”

Ben Sichel is a writer and teacher in Halifax.

The Coal In Our Veins

Nova Scotia’s addiction to dirty, bloody power

by ANGELA DAY

HALIFAX—Wind farms aside, Nova Scotia is coal country. Approximately three-quarters of the province’s electricity is derived from this fossil fuel and much of it is imported—but not without conflict.

“Indigenous peoples [in Colombia] have been displaced from their traditional lands for multinationals to access resources that are then exported to us for our energy needs,” according to Garry Leech, author and professor at the University of Cape Breton.

Cape Breton, a rugged island off the northeastern tip of Nova Scotia, used to be the home of coal mining in the province, and is where miners joined the first trade union in North America—the Provincial Workman’s Association (PWA). The PWA was incorporated in Springhill, NS, in 1881 by coal miners demanding better wages and living conditions.

Today, at the Sydney port not far from the union’s origins, coal is unloaded from Colombia.

Nova Scotia began importing coal from the US in the 1950s and 60s for reasons of quality, since the coal mined here was a dirty, low-grade fuel. “Then, taking advantage of...neoliberal economic policies in the late 1990s, the province began to import coal from Colombia instead,” said Leech.

He explains that over the past 20 years, globalization has had a huge impact on Colombia, “opening up Colombia’s resources to foreign investment, particularly in mining and oil.” Cerrejon, a coal mine in northern Colombia, is now the largest open-pit coal mine in the world, and is the reason many Nova Scotians (and New Brunswickers) can turn on their lights, heat their homes and eat toast. All of the coal mined at Cerrejon is exported to Canada, the US and Europe.

Leech dismisses the common argument that Cerrejon’s profit trickles down to Colombians. “While, on paper, this mine contributes to the country’s GDP, most of the wealth generated from the mine leaves the country as profit for foreign-owned multinationals. The people in the affected areas are often living in poverty, and their homes have been devastated.”

MiningWatch cites ongoing damage to homes and severe skin and respiratory diseases suffered by people in the area.

Alongside a deplorable track record of human rights protection and a decades-long civil war, these factors have led to Colombian coal being dubbed “blood coal.”

Nevertheless, Nova Scotia continues to source mass amounts of coal from Colombia, and Brennan Vogel, Energy Coordinator at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax, says he doesn’t see the province moving away from coal anytime soon.

Nova Scotia’s electricity provider—Nova Scotia Power Incorporated (NSPI)—is a private company that is guaranteed a 10 per cent return on investment by the provincial government. Changing its infrastructure to an energy source other than coal would be an expensive process, says Vogel. Because of this, Vogel sees a need for a broader conversation about electricity.

“Is energy a commodity,” he asks, “or is it a right like water or food, that people need to be assured of?”

Leech says energy doesn’t need to be linked to human rights violations and can be more environmentally friendly. But, according to him, “this has never been the motive of NSPI. They have a monopoly in the province...So, as long as it’s profitable, they’ll keep doing what they’re doing.”

Angela Day is a writer, educator, urban gardener and community organizer with roots in Halifax. She currently coordinates programs for young women across HRM.

These articles were produced by the Halifax Media Co-op for A People's Forecast: The Climate Justice Issue, our 2011 special issue. Come launch the special issue in Halifax on Wednesday, May 18! To read more climate justice articles as they are published, click here.

Turbine Miner

It's Not Easy Being Green!

Tim McSorley — Mon, 09 May 2011 05:11:58 +0000

Unraveling myths of sustainable power

VANCOUVER & TORONTO—As the climate crisis worsens, the Canadian public is being told that new developments in “green energy” are helping reduce the carbon footprint of our energy needs. The PR push around green energy comes as the fossil fuels sector in Canada is plowing ahead, extracting heavy crude from the tar sands, pulling coal from open pit mines, and opening up remote territories for natural gas extraction.

While the idea of cleaner energy resonates with many, provincial governments have increasingly undermined the concept of “greener” energy production. Today, high-impact hydro-electric and nuclear power projects make up a significant percentage of so-called clean energy targets in Ontario and British Columbia.

“The climate argument is being used as a justification for lots of new dams around the world. It’s being used to greenwash dams,” Patrick McCully, Executive Director of the International Rivers Network (IRN) told The Dominion. He highlighted hydro-kinetic turbines, and wave and tidal energy as potential alternatives in the ongoing redefinition of hydro potential.

“There’s a possibility of getting electricity out of flowing water in an environmentally benign way, but not by building big dams everywhere,” added McCully. “And lots of small dams on lots of small rivers—that could also do a lot of harm.”

As with large-scale hydro-electric dams, the greening of nuclear power is dependent on the omission of economic externalities: costs or benefits that affect a third party and are not accounted for in market transactions. Nuclear power generation offers a clear example of the externalities potentially overshadowing the direct impacts of a nuclear power plant itself.

Along with hydro, wind, and solar, nuclear power is considered by the Canadian government to be “clean energy,” defined as “energy that is produced, transmitted, distributed and used with low or zero greenhouse gas (GHG) and other air emissions.” The government of Canada has indicated that by 2020, 90 per cent of the country’s electricity will come from these “non-emitting sources,” including nuclear power.

PHOTO: SAM BRAD

“The nuclear power industry has latched onto global warming as an argument for its renaissance,” wrote Karl Coplan, a Law Professor, in 2008. “[Put] simply, the nuclear industry, with government complicity, has transferred and deferred the most expensive part of the cost of the nuclear fuel cycle to future generations and civilizations unknown,” he wrote, addressing the contentious externality of nuclear fuel waste over its lifespan of at least hundreds of thousands of years.
Communities across Canada have been negatively impacted all the way along the nuclear fuel cycle.

On the front end is uranium, of which Canada is the world’s number one supplier. According to the Canadian Nuclear Association’s Nuclear Facts, “In 2008, the uranium mines in Saskatchewan accounted for approximately 21 per cent of the world’s total uranium production.”

Canada’s uranium deposits and mines are concentrated in the Athabasca Region in northern Saskatchewan, in First Nations territory. Strong resistance to uranium mining across the country over the last several decades has resulted in uranium mining bans in different provinces and regions.

“Mining companies came and robbed us of our country, where we lived, fished and hunted,” said Annie Benonie. The 88-year-old from Wollaston Lake near the Saskatchewan uranium mines was interviewed by Swedish journalist Fredrik Loberg last year. “The land will never be restored again [for] future generations,” she said.

Canadian uranium powers nuclear plants in a number of provinces, including Ontario. Today, Ontario’s energy grid stands at a crossroads. According to the Ontario Power Authority, by 2025 80 per cent of the province’s aging energy-generating infrastructure, traditionally powered by nuclear, hydro and coal, will need to be replaced to avoid increasing power line loss and allow for broader deployment of renewable energy projects. By 2030, the province plans to spend an additional $87 billion on overhauling the power grid.

“The constraint in increasing the installation of renewables is currently in transmission and distribution,” Adam Scott, Renewable Energy Coordinator at Environmental Defence, told The Dominion. “Ontario needs dramatic upgrades to the transmission and distribution systems.”

Yet, at this critical moment, the province’s recently released Long Term Energy Plan (LTEP) is focused primarily on the rapid elimination of coal-fired generation—using increases in nuclear, hydro and natural gas generation—in order to meet the modest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change targets of 450 parts per million atmospheric CO₂ by 2045.

Of the forecasted $87 billion in capital investment, the LTEP estimates $33 billion will be spent on nuclear power compared with $9 billion on solar, $14 billion on wind, $4.6 billion on hydro and $4 billion on biomass.

Scott, however, is generally pleased with the LTEP, pointing to the fact that it puts a greater emphasis on Ontario’s Feed In Tariff (FIT) program, which compensates wind and solar generators for energy they produce and feed in to the grid. Such programs have been successfully adopted over the past 20 years throughout Europe.

“Ontario added more solar power in its first year than [any FIT program in] Spain, Germany [or] France,” added Scott.

However, not everyone agrees that the LTEP was a step in the right direction. Criticism from environmental organizations has focused on the potential of a nuclear disaster, coupled with the long-term commitment required to re-invest in the technology.

“[Ontario] exempted its nuclear electricity plan from an environmental assessment,” said Shawn Stensil, Nuclear Analyst at Greenpeace Canada, in a news release. Stensil stated that nuclear re-investment “will limit the long-term growth of cleaner, safer and more affordable energy options.” A recent study commissioned by Greenpeace, the Pembina Institute, and the Canadian Environmental Law Association claims that renewable investment with a larger wind portfolio would be cheaper than re-investing in nuclear power.

The enormous cost overruns of nuclear power continue to be a point of contention even among those who are optimistic about the province’s expansion of FIT. “LTEP didn’t move us away from nuclear. We’re actually paying other jurisdictions to use the surplus electricity at night from reactors that can’t be throttled down,” Mike Brigham, Chairperson of the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-op [TREC], told The Dominion.

TREC helps incubate locally owned solar and wind projects such as Windshare, a 100-metre-high turbine located along Toronto’s waterfront that produces enough energy to power at least 100 homes per year. An urban project like Windshare could never be built today, said Brigham, because of recent legislation prohibiting the construction of turbines within 500 metres of residential areas. As a result, groups like TREC have invested a significant amount of resources in solar installations, which can be deployed in both rural and urban areas.

At the other end of the fuel cycle is nuclear waste. In late January, New Brunswickers held a rally outside the NB Power headquarters in Fredericton, protesting the costly and potentially hazardous errors made in the ongoing reconstruction of the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station. Located along the northern shore of the Bay of Fundy, only some 20 kilometres west of Saint John, Point Lepreau has a history of controversy, including a 1997 leak in the reactor core that produced a 75-day shutdown.

Atlantic organizations joined forces with the Nuclear Out of Quebec Movement (MSQN) to denounce Hydro-Quebec’s plans to remodel the Gentilly-2 Nuclear Generating Station in Becancour, 100 kilometres northeast of Montreal. They point to the controversial Point Lepreau reconstruction, slated to go back online in 2012, as reason enough for their opposition.

A joint press statement released by the MSQN and Atlantic organization representatives on January 26, 2011, the same day as the NB protest, said Gentilly-2 will be “far more costly than anticipated, and will create entirely new categories of radioactive waste that will have to remain in Quebec for permanent storage because the federal government takes no responsibility for such wastes.” The release also noted that the upgrades would add approximately 100 tonnes of high-level waste to the existing stockpile for every year of continued operation.

In terms of policy at the federal level, the “Creating the Economy of Tomorrow” budget document on Canada’s Economic Action Plan website outlines investments in science and technology, as well as in universities and research. While improving infrastructure at universities and colleges has the highest stimulus value for 2009-10 out of the 13 categories included, “Strengthening Canada’s nuclear advantage” is in second place at $351 million. Right behind it is “Transformation to a Green Energy Economy” at $200 million. The budget allotment for nuclear development is over ten times more than the amount designated for the Canada Graduate Scholarships program.

The development of sustainable technologies is constantly redefining the potential for “green” energy in Canada; however, as of yet, the term has not captured much real meaning.

Justin Saunders is an information technologist and journalist based in Toronto. Sandra Cuffe is a freelance writer, a contributing member of the Vancouver Media Co-op, and a coffee-lover.

This article was published in A People's Forecast: The Climate Justice Issue, our 2011 special issue. To read more articles as they are published, click here.

Good power bad power

Good power bad power II

BC Hydro-St'at'imc Authority Agreement Creates a Wave of Opposition

Moira Peters — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 05:17:30 +0000

Deal opens territory to hydro in new ways, say critics

VANCOUVER—A new agreement between BC Hydro, the province of British Columbia and the St'at'imc Chiefs Council was approved in a nation-wide vote last weekend, but a group of St'at'imc community members say they're still determined to stop the deal.

The six-volume agreement is said to have a net-worth of $210 million. It is payable over the next 99 years through a nation-wide trust and individual one-time payouts for each of the 11 St’at’imc communities.

Confidential talks between St'at'imc negotiators and BC Hydro took place over the last 17 years, and the contents of the agreement were released to St'at'imc people in January 2011. It went to a vote on April 9, 2011. An estimated 45 per cent of St’at’imc people participated, 72 per cent of whom voted in favour of the deal.

"The majority of our people didn't even know about [the agreement]," said Roger Adolph, who was chief of the Xaxli'p band for 21 years. “It was initialed off by the Chiefs in December of 2010, then they started having information sessions in January, February and March,” he said.

Mike Leach, Chair of the St’at’imc Chiefs Council, was one of the key negotiators of the agreement.

“It is definitely a good deal, because we're only dealing with one issue—we're dealing with only the impacts of hydro on the territory,” Leach said. “There is no extinguishment of St’at’imc rights to our lands.”

But the agreement does provide BC Hydro with certainty of access and possession to transmission lines and all their facilities on St’at’imc territory, which lies northwest of the Fraser Valley. St'at'imc territory, which has never been surrendered or ceded, is already home to three dams, two reservoirs and four generating stations, as well as 15 transmission circuits that make up 850 kilometres of transmission lines. In addition, BC Hydro has built 160 kilometres of access roads and four recreation facilities in St'at'imc lands.

“The agreement will provide BC Hydro and the Province of BC with operational certainty for BC Hydro’s existing facilities into the future,” reads a press release put out by the company last week.

“As I read it, Aboriginal title has not been extinguished, but it has been limited,” said Adolph, who is a vocal critic of the agreement, and says the recent agreement will change the parameters of struggle against future BC Hydro projects in St’at’imc territory.

"The Chiefs have agreed that if any individual, group or community that advances a title and right issue [against BC Hydro] through direct action, the Chiefs will come down on those people to stop them,” said Adolph.“It's right in the agreement, in the certainty agreement. I call it a gag order.”

A gag order has already been put into effect at the local level: on April 6, 2011, the publisher of the St’at’imc Runner was locked out of the office where she’s worked for the last five years. The reason given was that the monthly community newspaper ran a four-page ad, paid for by individuals, pushing for a “no” vote on April 9. This came just after BC Hydro provided St’at’imc Nation Hydro with a $500,000 “interim payment," upon the Chiefs’ initialing the agreement on December 17. These funds were used to promote and carry out its ratification.

Spokespeople for BC Hydro and the provincial Ministry of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation refused to comment on the agreement.

This is the first time that the St’at’imc people have, as a nation, made any kind of agreement with the province. This raises additional considerations: they now must officially form a nation-level government.

“In order to manage this agreement we will have to put into place a St’at’imc government,” said Leach, who at the moment is interim chair of the St’at’imc Chiefs Council. “Once we've agreed on a format for that government, which we're working on now just to be able to manage this agreement, cause there's a lot involved, there will be an election for a chair once that is done.”

“So if I decided to run, I become the chair, right?” he said, pausing for a moment before adding, “or maybe somebody else.”

But for some, signing an agreement before a structure with a mandate to represent the nation exists is putting the chicken before the egg.

“It's 11 chiefs getting together called the St’at’imc Chiefs Council, now they're calling themselves the St’at’imc Authority, and they don't have a mandate from the people to be there,” said Adolph. “The only mandate they have is for their individual communities, where they've been elected by their people under the Indian Act to run Department of Indian Affairs programs.”

As per the new agreement, a new St'at'imc Authority will be formally constituted with recognition by British Columbia, rather than through a St’at’imc process.

“There is no organization, there's no governance structure, there's no bylaws,” said Adolph in reference to the St’at’imc Authority. “They don’t even have an office, and yet the province and BC Hydro recognize the St’at’imc Authority as having the legal power.”

Adolph and others have promised that they will continue to fight the agreement. “There's a group of us and the group is growing,” said Adolph. “This agreement is more than just past grievances [about existing hydro projects],” he said. “BC Hydro got their wish.”

Dawn Paley is a Vancouver-based journalist. This article was originally published by the Vancouver Media Co-op.

St'at'imc power lines

St'at'imc.poster

Sludge Storm

hillarybain — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 06:31:37 +0000

Conference organizers want biosolids out of Nova Scotia

HALIFAX—Learning that kiln-baked sewage sludge, also known as "biosolids", is being marketed and sold across Nova Scotia as fertilizer, came as a shock to Lil MacPherson. MacPherson owns The Wooden Monkey, a Halifax restaurant that emphasizes local, seasonal and organic ingredients.

“I'm out there, trying my best, through the restaurant, to promote local foods, and promote sustainable agriculture,” says MacPherson. “Then all of a sudden I get this news, that we're using seriously toxic sewage sludge spread throughout Nova Scotia, which eventually goes through our food system, and I was horrified.”

MacPherson was troubled that much of Halifax didn't know what happened to their waste once it went “flush.” Looking to plunge Haligonians into the light, she and long-time friend Ellen Page are staging an event coined The Nova Scotia Soil Conference, on March 13, 2011.

The purpose of the conference is to discuss whether Halifax Regional Municipality's (HRM) baked sludge is safe for soil application of any kind. A wide range of speakers will be on hand, including internationally renowned microbiologist, and US Environmental Protection Agency whistle-blower, Dr David Lewis, as well as President of Minas Basin Pulp and Power, Scott Travers. Travers is slated to discuss the potential for energy extraction from sludge.

Sludge is the substance that falls to the bottom of a settling tank in a waste treatment plant, and human fecal matter is just the tip of the sludge-berg. Sludge from a typical city's sewers can, and often does, contain heavy metals, pharmaceutical residues (excreted traces of the drugs that so many of us ingest on a daily basis), hospital waste, as well as an array of substances termed by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) as "Emerging Substances of Concern." ESOCs include personal care products, flame retardants and musks, to name but a few.

Fighting alongside MacPherson, and also slated to speak at the March 13 conference, is Jason Hoffman. A former Iowan cattle farmer, Hoffman has a PhD in plant physiology and biochemistry, and is now a Compost Consultant in the HRM. He advocates extreme caution when dealing with sludge, and certainly doesn't recommend using it, whether cooked or raw, as fertilizer.

“The problem is not with the human excrement itself,” says Hoffman, “it’s everything else. Although even if you were just dealing with the human excrement, you still have the not inconsiderable problem of pharmaceutical residues...and the scale is huge. [The] drug industry assumes no responsibility for that aspect of it.”

Hoffman also warns of the practice of applying biosolids to pasturing lands, a practice which is endorsed by Nova Scotia as safe for biosolids.

“I know how cows eat grass. They get a mouthful and they pull it up and there’s often a lot of dirt hanging on that.” says Hofman, explaining one of the ways that biosolids can enter the food system. “So it’s a direct ingestion problem. Then there’s the whole question of fat-soluble accumulation in the milk. The dairy people ought to be very concerned about that. [Milk products are] the last place you want to put biosolids.”

“Not everybody buys into the notion that what we put into our drain ends up back in our food chain. People just can’t make that connect because we are disconnected from how our food is grown,” says Marilyn Cameron, also slated to speak at the conference, and Chair of the Biosolids Caucus of the Nova Scotia Environmental Network (NSEN). “It’s going to take a long time to restructure society and get us to be more responsible for what we put down our drains.”

Cameron notes that in the meantime there are technologies for processing sludge that are “absolutely incredible.”

One of those technologies is the Canadian-developed, and internationally renowned Plasma Assisted Sludge Oxidation (PASO) system, which uses a plasma torch to oxidize the water trapped within the sludge. Heat energy, which can be potentially captured and used, is released as a by-product. Hydro Quebec developed the technology, and Fabgroups, a Quebec-based company, has signed a licensing agreement to develop, manufacture, and market it. Fabgroups has set up a test PASO system in Valleyfield, Quebec, and has been entertaining big-time investors from the US.

“Basically it reduces [sludge] to sand-like crumbs,” says Ted Mulhern, Director of Business Development for Fabgroups. “Typically you have a 20-fold reduction in volume.” Jean-Paul Gendron, Coordinator for Water and Environment for the city of Valleyfield, notes that their PASO system reduces Valleyfield's 8,000 metric tons of sludge to 900 tons of end-product.

“At a plant at full capacity,” says Mulhern, “with an oven that can handle four-and-a-half wet tons of sludge per hour, you're generating at about 12 million British thermal units per hour. That translates into about 3.5 megawatts of thermal energy every hour [and the system is] designed to run 24/7."

According to Mulhern, that's enough energy to power a conventional waste treatment plant, typically a city's largest energy expenditure, with enough energy left over to feed the grid. Given Nova Scotia's current fixation on coal of questionable origins, sludge-derived power may not be so far-fetched.

“It has great potential to generate alternative forms of energy at a very low cost,” says Mulhern. “Typically your cost of producing electricity is at about four cents a kilowatt, so it's a very interesting technology.”

While the test plant in Valleyfield is not set up for energy capture quite yet, Fabgroups is preparing to install this key piece of technology in the near future.

But while Valleyfield and other communities look towards the future of waste management, Nova Scotia remains knee-deep in its own sludge.

Since 2008, Greater Halifax’s sludge has been handed over to a company called N-Viro Systems Canada LP. NVS, whose facility is located in Aerotech Park, near the Halifax Airport, adds a hearty dose of cement dust into the mix, and bakes the whole mess in a kiln.

The end product is trademarked as N-Viro Soil, and is sold across Nova Scotia as a Canadian Food Inspection Agency-approved fertilizer. CFIA seal of approval notwithstanding, critics, including Hoffman and Cameron, claim that applying N-Viro Soil to the earth is introducing a mysterious mix of potentially harmful ingredients right into the soil.

A recent study by the CCME found that a plethora of pharmaceuticals were turning up in survey samples of N-Viro Soil. ESOCs with proven cancer-causing track records, such as Bisphenol A, were also present.

“The problem as I see it is that this material just has too many contaminants,” says Hoffman. “When you look at the CCME study, the findings are in nanograms, which is parts per billion. And it’s very easy to dismiss any one of these compounds individually. But collectively there are thousands and thousands. Doing what? We know not.”

Hoffman also takes issue with N-Viro's addition of cement kiln dust into their end-product.

“What they try to do in Nova Scotia,” explains Hoffman, “because we have acidic agricultural soil, is...promote ‘liming’ [from cement kiln dusts]. Cement kiln dust comes with its own basket of ‘what’s in it?’ and that needs to be looked at.”

The Canadian Horticultural Council (CHC) and the CFIA, the very agency that licenses N-Viro Soil as a fertilizer, agree. The CHC and CFIA developed the Food Safety Program (FSP) which is a series of guidelines that large-scale produce buyers, such as Sobeys and Loblaws, use when selecting growers to supply their stores with produce. The FSP does not allow for Canadian produce-growers to apply municipal waste, N-Viro Soil included, onto crop-growing soil.

“The concern...is with possible chemical contaminants to the biosolids,” says Heather Gale, National Program Manager of CanadaGAP, the CHC's On-Farm Food Safety Program. “That might be things like pharmaceuticals or even something like personal care products that might get concentrated in the waste.”

NVS, for its part, claims that N-Viro Soil is safe for crop application of all kinds, and that it has the science to prove it.

“The only place that [N-Viro Soil] is not being applied to agricultural crops is fruits and vegetables in Canada. Nowhere else in the world,” says Lise LeBlanc, of LP Consulting Ltd, speaking for NVS. “And NVS is going to re-debate that, because [they] recognized that it’s not based on science. It is based on what most scientists call the 'yuck factor.'”

The "yuck factor", or "wisdom of repugnance", is not why CHC has rejected N-Viro Soil, says Gale. She says they have seen NVS's science, and they aren't impressed.

“So far”, says Gale, “NVS has not been able to provide the information that our technical working group is looking for that would put their mind to rest around it.”

For the moment, only NVS knows where the N-Viro Soil goes. Cameron has filed a freedom of information request for a list of NVS's customers, but has yet to receive it. In the interim, Cameron has collected the signatures of over 400 Nova Scotia farmers who have made the promise to never apply biosolids to their land.

MacPherson, in setting up The Nova Scotia Soil Conference, and in her buying practices at The Wooden Monkey, is showing solidarity with those farmers.

"Biosolids is not for The Monkey", says MacPherson, "and we don't support that. We support and focus on buying from Nova Scotia farmers, and we will not buy any products that are grown using biosolids. Biosolids [are] not about recycling, it's just pollution transfer. It's not for the future of farmers in Nova Scotia, and we are supporting the farmers that are taking a stand with us."

Miles Howe hails from Ottawa, Ontario, and currently calls Halifax home. He has a Masters degree in Sociology, plays a wicked harmonica, and ferments a mean kimchi.

Toilet Sludge

Hemp Wanted

Moira Peters — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 05:59:20 +0000

Once illegal material promises dizzying array of green energy uses

HALIFAX—Wanda Beattie, president and CEO of Atlantic Healing Hemp, paces the floor of her flagship store in Berwick, Nova Scotia. She is a woman on a mission. The shelves around her are lined with hemp salves, hemp balms, cold-pressed hemp seed oil and vacuum-sealed bags of crushed hemp seeds. The hemp is top quality and Canadian grown, but it’s definitely not local—and that's something Beattie would like to change.

“At the moment I’m bringing in hemp oil in large quantities from Winnipeg," she says. "That’s the hemp heartland. There was an attempt to grow hemp in Nova Scotia, back in 2000, but it wasn’t feasible because there wasn’t a market for the product. There was some amateur processing being done, but nothing of any scale."

Beattie's mission: to resurrect the deep-seeded relationship between Nova Scotia soil and hemp.

Port Royal, Nova Scotia, was the site of North America’s first recorded hemp crop, in 1606.

But by 2009, Saskatchewan had 5,090 acres licensed for hemp and Manitoba had 6,015 acres. Nova Scotia had none.

“The issue is not related to soil,” says Beattie. “There is wonderful soil here in the Annapolis Valley. You can grow hemp here. Top quality hemp. In 2000, Nova Scotia farmers proved it could be done. There’s simply not enough of a market.”

The hemp plant has had many uses. Christopher Columbus swore by hemp sails. Hemp rope, even 50-year-old hemp rope, is still highly sought after for its water-resistant qualities. Anything oil, lumber or cotton can do, hemp can do better. The seeds can be eaten or pressed into oil. Both methods of ingestion are extremely healthy.

As Beattie will tell you, hemp seeds contain all the essential fatty acids. Her hemp cream also goes on smooth after a shave.

Re-education is a large part of Beattie’s campaign to get hemp back into the Nova Scotia diet and consciousness. She and her husband Brian offer weekly, one-hour information sessions out of the Berwick store. She also offers free presentations to Nova Scotia groups and businesses.

“People in the area just don’t know about the benefits of hemp. We grew up in a generation that didn’t hear anything about hemp. Consumers are looking at our products now, and they know they have a value, because they have been used for thousands of years. Younger people are using hemp as a preventative, incorporating it into their diets to stay healthy." Others use it to treat chronic health issues like sciatic nerve pain, eczema, psoriasis, arthritis, acid reflux and to lower chloresterol levels.

Hemp was banned in Canada and the US in 1938. Jack Herer, in his book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, highlights the link between DuPont’s patenting, that same year, of the processes of making plastics out of petroleum and paper out of wood pulp, and the continent-wide ban on growing hemp. In 1998, amid growing interest in textile alternatives, Health Canada lifted its ban.

Hemp requires a relatively small up-front investment for processing infrastructure. Compared to oil, pulp and cotton, hemp is of higher quality and is much cheaper. Hemp is therefore a logical alternative to many of the products the Western diet currently consumes at an alarming rate.

Travis Truso is the owner of Hemp Haven in Regina, Saskatchewan. He has been in the hemp selling business for six years, and he is the main contact for the Saskatchewan Hemp Association.

“I’ve talked to 100 farmers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and only one of them even baled his stalk," says Truso. "The rest just burned their stalks or cultivated them back into the soil. Ninety-nine per cent of farmers are just selling their hemp seed. There is zero industry in Canada for fibre and stalk.”

The fibre and stalk of the hemp plant is where so many of its benefits are found. When processed, the fibres and hurd (stalk centre) can produce a multitude of products.

“There are quite a few encouraging things going on in Canada with hemp right now," says Truso. "Motive is a car company out of Alberta. They just created an electric car, and the body of the car is made out of hemp composite. The car has been reviewed really positively, and they want to commercially launch it by 2013."

“I see hemp fibre board as being a very promising industry with lots of room to grow," he says. "Right now the government annually subsidizes the lumber industry with $1 billion of taxpayers’ money. You cannot produce paper from lumber for the price we buy it at in the store. The entire industry is subsidized. And once you cut a forest down, your next crop isn’t ready for 100 years. Why have we built a society that takes trees for paper? It’s insane.”

Truso argues that when it comes to textiles, hemp doesn’t just compete with cotton, it’s far superior.

"The absurdity of growing cotton for textiles... Pests love it, and the only way it could have evolved was through intensive labour. Cotton needed slave labour to evolve. And then the product is just a short, brittle piece of fibre that wears out in a year. Hemp makes the strongest fibre, and it doesn’t wear out, it wears in. Levis jeans were originally made from hemp.”

Truso also points to hemp's potential energy efficiency.

“Henry Ford grew hemp, and his first diesel engine ran off hemp oil at 90 per cent cleaner and 60 per cent more efficient than fuel oil. It’s got the most biomass per crop, per acre, of anything grown.”

Hemp is also one of the greenest crops grown. “All the farmers that currently grow hemp in Saskatchewan do so keeping organic practices in mind," says Truso. "They are growing it in rotation with wheat, rye and grain crops. Hemp pulls an enormous amount of toxins out of the soil, and I’ve got it from a representative from Health Canada who says that if hemp were grown in three consecutive years on the same land, that land would be free of other weeds. You can virtually drop the seed in the soil, come back in 120 days, and combine your yield.”

Canadian law, however, makes it hard to be a hemp farmer. “Hemp is the only legal crop in Canada that requires a license to grow. You have to go through so much paper work. You need to have a criminal check, and you need to have your crops tested for THC content twice yearly. For a lot of farmers, the hassle is just too much.”

Processing the stalk, on an industrial scale, requires a processing plant, which would cost several million dollars—so far a prohibitive sum for investors. Various levels of Canadian government have had several opportunities to build a Canadian hemp processing plant, and each time they failed to seal the deal.

Truso talks about one that got away.

“In Craik, Saskatchewan, a company called Natural Alternative Technologies (NAT) approached the town with the idea of building a hemp processing plant. That was in 2004. At that point we had a New Democratic government in Saskatchewan, and they were for it. They offered up half the capital for the plant if NAT could raise the rest.

"From 2004 to 2008, NAT developed its technology, and raised its capital. In 2008 Saskatchewan elected the Saskatchewan Party, which is a far right party. In their first week of being in office they cancelled their contract with NAT. Since then NAT has gone bankrupt, and has sold its technology to Haines Underwear.”

Despite growing almost 20,000 acres of hemp, Canada remains without a plant to process it. Canadian hemp stalks, for lack of a buyer, are burned. Hemp-stalk products, among them hemp textiles, are largely imported from China.

“Almost every Canadian designer that’s manufacturing hemp clothing is getting their yarn from China," says Truso. "The floor of my store is made from hemp fibre board. It’s twice as strong as plywood and will last twice as long. I bought it imported from China.”

Without government assistance, and without a processing plant, hemp farmers across Saskatchewan are still growing over 5,000 acres of hemp. Only the seeds are being harvested.

“There are no government subsidies for hemp seed," says Truso. "The farmers need to go out on their own, and find all of their own contracts. At the end of the year, a lot of them still have 50 to 100,000 pounds of hemp seed left over.”

Truso says any initiative for processing stalk will have to come from the grassroots. “A company called Hill Agra in Ontario has invented a portable fibre extractor that can fit behind any tractor. The base model sells for $80,000. Several have been sold to Europe, and quite a few to China, but so far none in Canada. In the spring this extractor would decorticate your fibre and your hurds [process the stalk]. You’d be ready to stamp fibre boards. You’d be ready to mix hemp concrete."

"And," he adds, "hemp is still illegal to grow in America, so you’d have a huge market for your product. You’d be creating a groundbreaking industry."

For more information on applying to grow your own hemp, contact the Controlled Substances Division of Health Canada, at 1-613-948-6408.

Miles Howe hails from Ottawa, Ontario, and currently calls Halifax home. He has a Masters degree in Sociology, plays a wicked harmonica, and bakes a mean banana cake.

Hemp seeds

Hemp yarn

On the map with Avi Lewis

Van Ferrier — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:18:37 +0000

Oil. Canada has it and the US craves it. But what are the implications of treating Alberta's tar sands as America's security blanket?

Canada's Tar Lobby

dawn — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:50:45 +0000

Tar Sands Lobbyists Focus on US Democrats

As the US election campaign kicks into overdrive, Canadian politicians and oil executives are stepping up lobbying efforts to make sure whoever controls the White House keeps purchasing notoriously dirty oil from the Alberta tar sands.

Executives from energy company Nexen Inc., which has major investments in northern Alberta's heavy oil industry, and Tony Clement, chair of a Canadian cabinet committee on energy security, met with Democratic candidate Barack Obama's top energy advisor Jason Grumet in late August to cement the "energy partnership" during the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.

The closed-door meeting comes on the heels of comments made by Grumet and other Obama officials – comments that sent shivers through board rooms in Calgary and backhoes in Fort McMurray, the epicentres of Canada's oil industry.

In June, Grumet told reporters, "The amount of energy that you have to use to get that [tar sands] oil out of the ground is such that it actually creates a much greater impact on climate change."

"We [Obama's team] are going to support resources...that meet our long-term obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And I think it's an open question as to whether or not the Canadian resources are going to meet those tests," said Grumet prior to meeting the Canadian delegation at the DNC.

Currently, Canada is the largest foreign supplier of oil to the United States, sending more than one million barrels of oil per day to its southern neighbour. About half of this supply originates from Alberta's tar sands.

"Clearly the oil sands is the most high-impact oil available," said Simon Dyer of the Pembina Institute, an environmental watchdog.

"The oil sands are three times as greenhouse gas-intensive as regular oil," said Dyer, adding that roughly three barrels of water are required to process one barrel of heavy oil.

Tar sands production is set to increase from its current 1.2 million barrels of oil per day, to three million barrels per day by 2018, most of which is slated for export to the United States.

Tony Clement, the Canadian minister of health, told reporters at the DNC, "We [the Conservative government] have to be more aggressive in representing Canadian values and interests in the American political scene."

Neither Nexen Inc., nor Minister Clement's office returned phone calls requesting comment.

"The Canadian government is trying to deal through the back room rather than dealing with the environmental impacts of the oil sands," Dyer told this reporter. "Emissions from the oil sands are going to triple [by 2020] and that's inconsistent with the world's desire to lessen climate change."

In addition to official political pressure from Canadian cabinet ministers attempting to force Obama's hand on the tar sands, the oil industry has hired high-powered lobbyists of its own. Gordon Giffin, a former US ambassador to Canada, is now a registered lobbyist in Washington for the energy firm Nexen Inc.

Canadian oil executives attending the Democratic National Convention issued thinly veiled threats to the Obama campaign, stating that tar sands oil would be shipped to China if a new administration in Washington imposed restrictions.

"If you don't like the oil sands oil, what companies will do [in Canada] is build a bigger pipeline to the west coast and export it to China and India," stated Nexen Inc.'s Dwain Lingenfelter, the company's vice-president of government relations and a former deputy premier of Saskatchewan.

"If the US didn't want the oil, it'll go into the oil market anyway...So they have to be very careful about looking at the whole picture," Lingenfelter, the politician-turned-oil lobbyist, told the Toronto Star.

As competition for energy resources between China and the United States intensifies, Lingenfelter's lobbying may sound convincing, but his analysis shouldn't be taken seriously, according to the Pembina Institute's Simon Dyer.

"A potential pipeline to Asia [though the port of Kitimat] would have to cross the territory of 40 First Nations, where land claims and treaty rights are still hotly contested," said Dyer. "There is growing opposition to pipelines and growing oil sands opposition across the country, so those pipelines [to China] are by no means a done deal."

While pipeline routes out of Alberta will be a major topic of controversy for years to come, there is no doubt that Canadian oil is among the world's most climate-unfriendly fuels.

During his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, Obama promised to end US dependence on Middle East oil within 10 years, while stating that "government must lead on energy independence."

Environmentalists in Canada and the US contend that closed-door meetings with oil executives are not the best way to foster energy independence.

The current Canadian government, which draws its political and financial support from petroleum-producing regions in the West, is not seen as independent from oil interests. In July alone, oil sands companies held a total of 36 meetings with Canadian ministers and government officials, according to recently disclosed lobbying reports.

Meanwhile, environmental groups only held seven lobbying sessions and these were usually with ministerial assistants and other lower-level officials.

Chris Arsenault holds the Phil Lind Fellowship at University of British Columbia's Department of History. He is currently writing a history of sabotage and the Alberta oil patch. Anyone (nameless or not) who can provide information about this should contact him at arsenault_chris[at]hotmail.com. A version of this article was originally published by Inter Press Service.

Tar Sands Lobby

Peru: Indigenous occupations end with victory in Congress

Sandra — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:07:33 +0000

On August 22nd, the Peruvian Congress repealed two legislative decrees at the root of the indigenous demonstrations that paralyzed various roads and energy installations from August 9th through 20th. The indigenous movement of the Amazon, home to 65 different indigenous nations, declared victory.

[note: several of the hyperlinks are to articles and websites in Spanish.]

Background

Peruvian President Alan Garcia approved more than 100 legislative decrees in the first half of 2008, making use of special powers bestowed upon the Executive branch by the Congress in order to bring the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the US and Peru into effect. The FTA was signed in 2006 and passed - despite opposition - by the US House and Senate in late 2007.

What the Tar Sands Need

dru — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:39:45 +0000

Processing requires massive inputs of water, energy, land, labour

Water

For each barrel of oil produced from the tar sands, between two and 4.5 barrels of water is needed. The water is used in the process of extracting bitumen from the naturally occurring the tar sand. The bitumen is later "upgraded" into synthetic crude oil.

In 2007, the government of Alberta approved the withdrawal of 119.5 billion gallons of water for tar sands extraction, of which an estimated 82 per cent came from the Athabasca River. Of that, extraction companies were only required to return 10 billion gallons to the river.

Most of the water used ends up in giant, toxic tailing ponds. As of 2006, tailing ponds covered 50-square kilometers of former boreal forest. By 2010, according to the Oil Sands Tailings Research Facility, the industry will have generated 8 billion tons of waste sand and 1 billion cubic metres of waste water--enough to fill 400,000 olympic-sized swimming pools. Today, the largest human-made dam by volume of materials is the Syncrude tailing pond, a few kilometres from the Athabasca river.

The waste sand and water contain naphtha and paraffin, which are used in the extraction process, and oil leftovers like benzene, naphthenic acid and polyaromatic hydrocarbon, among others. Chemicals found in the tailing ponds are known to cause liver problems and brain hemorrhaging in mammals, and deformities and death in birds.

It is difficult to estimate the volume of toxins that make their way into the Athabsca, but downstream communities like Fort Chipewyan have reported high occurrences of rare cancers, lupus, multiple sclerosis and other diseases in recent years. Local fishermen have reported boils and deformities in fish. One winter, an oil slick was discovered under the ice. Syncrude later admitted that there had been a spill about 200 kilometres upstream.

The Athabasca also feeds Great Slave Lake, Deh Cho (the Mackenzie River) and vast northern watersheds. Water from the Athabasca flows all the way to the Arctic Ocean, and plays an essential role in the lives of indigenous communities and vast areas of Boreal forest.

Energy

Between digging up the tar sand, separating out the bitumen, and subsequently upgrading it to synthetic heavy crude, the extraction process requires vast amounts of energy. Because the tar sand and bitumen must be heated, about 1/6 of the energy provided by a barrel of oil is expended to extract one barrel of oil from tar sand.

Opponents of the tar sands say that burning a relatively clean fuel like natural gas to produce oil undermines any efforts to reduce climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions and transition to sustainable fuel sources. According to estimates from the Pembina Institute, the tar sands will account for 25 per cent of Canada's emissions by 2020, if Kyoto targets are reached.

The vast amounts of natural gas needed to extract millions of barrels of oil per day are leading to an anticipated shortage of supply. As a result, several energy megaprojects have been proposed.

Perhaps the most contentious of the proposals is the $7 billion Mackenzie Gas Project, a 1220 kilometre pipeline that runs along the Mackenzie River Valley, from the Arctic Ocean to Alberta's northern border. The project would connect the estimated 82 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Mackenzie River delta with the tar sands extraction plants to the south.

A second project, the Alaska Gas Pipeline would connect Alaska's north slope, home to an estimated 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, with the Mackenzie valley route.

In part to make up for the natural gas supply taken up by the tar sands, Liquid Natural Gas terminals have been proposed in multiple locations on the west coast, east coast and along the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The terminals would receive natural gas from tankers incoming from the Middle East, Russia and other overseas sources.

Natural gas supply is still not enough to keep up with anticipated growth, leading industry to explore options such as nuclear power. Alberta's first nuclear power plant has been proposed in the town of Peace River, though it has faced some local opposition.

Much to the dismay of environmentalists, there is also discussion of building new coal-burning power plants into future tar sands upgrading facilities.

Labour

The Conference Board of Canada predicted in 2006 that Alberta would face a shortage of 332,000 workers by 2025. The figure has been dismissed as exaggerated (it is based on the current rate of growth continuing unimpeded), but it seems to be an accurate reflection of the concern Alberta's industrial sector has shown recently.

That tar sands require a massive influx of labour is not disputed. Another estimate says that 20,000 new positions will be created in the tar sands over the next three years.

The signs of a labour shortage are already apparent in Alberta. Workers from Newfoundland and the Maritimes are offered flights to and from Fort McMurray for the duration of their work term. Grocery stores and fast food joints offer hourly wages in the double digits, and sometimes offer signing bonuses.

Increasingly, workers are brought in from countries like China and the Philippines. In 2006, Immigration Canada issued 15,172 new "temporary work permits" in Alberta, bringing the number of temporary workers to 22,392.

Temporary workers differ from immigrants in that they have no access to immigration services, and can effectively be sent home. According to some reports, the workers' temporary status leaves the door open to abuse. In one case, 12 men brought in by a trucking company were charged $500 per month to live in a three-bedroom bungalow.

The temporary foreign workers program has sparked a debate over the development of the tar sands.

"Most skilled workers would prefer to have 20 years of stable employment rather than seven or eight years of frantic development," writes Gil McGowan of the Alberta Federation of Labour. If the pace of development was slowed, he writes, the need for temporary foreign workers would diminish.

Currently, development is heading in the opposite direction, with plans to increase production fivefold in the next twenty years. Regulations are being "streamlined," and plans are in place to further increase the number of foreign workers.

Land

Open pit mining of tar sands, according to the Government of Alberta, involves "clearing trees and brush from a site and removing the overburden - the topsoil, muskeg, sand, clay and gravel - that sits atop the oil sands deposit." The "overburden" that is removed is up to 75 metres (about 25 stories) deep, and the underlying tar sands are typically between 40 and 60 metres deep.

After trees and brush are clearcut and either burned or sent to sawmills, the area is drained, and any local rivers are rerouted. Giant trucks then remove soil, clay and sand to uncover the prized tar sands. The sands are then removed and taken to plants to be processed. In the end, an average of four tonnes of earth must be removed to render one barrel of oil.

In addition to tailing ponds (see "Water"), vast amounts of waste sand are generated. These sands, still containing traces of bitumen and other chemicals, are inhospitable to life. Near Syncrude's extraction plant, for example, a vast desert stretches over the horizon. The expanse shows no signs of life, and carries the overpowering smell of asphalt.

The tar sands cover an estimated 141,000-square kilometres, of which approximately 3,400-square kilometres will be strip mined if currently-approved projects go forward.

Government regulations require the strip-mined land to be "reclaimed," and returned to a "stable, biologically self-sustaining state." According to Syncrude's web site, this means "productive capability at least equal to its condition before operations began." Syncrude envisions "a mosaic landscape dominated by productive forests, wetland areas alive with waterfowl and grasslands supporting grazing animals."

So far, Suncor says it has reclaimed 858 hectares, accounting for less than 9 per cent of the land it has mined since 1967. Syncrude has mined 18,653 hectares, a little under a fifth of which it says it has reclaimed.

None of the land, however, has been officially certified as reclaimed by the government. Both corporations have billboard advertisements in Fort McMurray proclaiming the success of their reclamation programs. In the end, it is not clear that land will be fully reclaimed, and government agencies have been criticized as lax in enforcing regulations.

Water