Blogpost by Keith Stewart - May 30, 2011 at 6:57
Update: Based on subsequent media reports, it now appears that tar sands emissions were up 21 per cent from what was reported last year, but this year they have re-stated the 2008 emissions (increasing them from the previous estimate of 5 per cent of national emissions to 5.5 per cent) so that it is roughly an 11 per cent increase year-over-year.
I’m always intrigued when governments stop publishing information, so when the latest report from the federal government to the UN on Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions omitted the table with data on tar sands emissions, I was curious. As reported today, this was a deliberate choice, and I can understand why.
I did some math based on other information in the report and asked Environment Canada to confirm the numbers. It took almost two weeks, but I finally got an answer to my questions.
Total emissions from extracting and processing bitumen (before it makes it to the refinery) were 45 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MT) in 2009, or 6.5 per cent of national emission. This is 21% higher than the 37.2 MT from the tar sands in 2008. This also means that upstream emissions from the tar sands are responsible for more global warming-causing pollution than the tailpipes of every light-duty vehicle (aka cars) in the country.
This will put a lot of pressure on the federal government for stronger action, given Environment Minister Peter Kent’s pledge to introduce regulations on the (now admittedly soaring) greenhouse gas emissions of the tar sands by the end of this year.
The report is even more damaging for the industry’s public relations campaign. The spin coming out of oil companies and governments has been that while total emissions may be going up as production increases, things are really getting better because the emissions per barrel have declined by 39% since 1990.
This is no longer true, although there is conflicting information coming out of Environment Canada. Confusingly, the report to the UN clearly states that emissions intensity in the oil sands went up by 14.5 percent between 2008 and 2009, but the e-mail I got from Environment Canada said that this statement was incorrect. Rather, they had changed the way they calculated intensity and while the increase wasn’t that large between 2008 and 2009, the emissions reduction since 1990 and 2009 has been recalculated as 29 per cent, rather than 39 per cent.
The fact that emissions intensity is (at minimum) no longer improving wasn’t a surprise to us. In our recently-released report on in situ tar sands projects, we predicted that intensity would start to rise as energy-intensive in situ projects formed a larger proportion of tar sands production and companies are forced to pursue deeper and more difficult deposits. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the federal government either, however, as we based this assessment on an internal briefing note from Natural Resources obtained under Access to Information legislation.
So it will be really interesting to see what the feds do on regulating this rapidly growing problem.
Retrieved from http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/Blog/federal-government-trying-to-hide-that-ghgs-f/blog/35041
* color and emphasis added by the blogger
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