Canada takes to the grand stage with tar sands

In the words of Canada's oil minister, "we're starting to view ourselves as an energy superpower", and the nation's thick, pungent tar sands provide good cause for such a claim.

Joe Oliver, Canada's minister of natural resources. AFP

It holds the world's third-biggest oil reserves and has attracted tens of billions of dollars in investment from the United States and China - and it sees itself as a rival to Opec.

Its fossil-fuel projects bear optimistic names such as Sunrise and Millennium, developments it believes will help to swing the world's hydrocarbon balance of power away from the Middle East and towards the West.

And the name of this new kid on the block? Canada.

"We're sort of starting to view ourselves as an energy superpower," says Joe Oliver, the country's oil minister.

North America is undergoing a fossil-fuels renaissance as new techniques allow it to extract crude oil and natural gas from never-before-imagined sources such as the Canadian tar sands that hold 97 per cent of the nations's known reserves. Resources from oil to gas to minerals account for 10 per cent of the Canadian economy today, and that percentage is expected to grow as the country churns through the tar sands and the 170 billion barrels in reserves they are estimated to hold.

Mr Oliver was in Kuwait City last week along with energy ministers and chief executives from 87 other nations to discuss energy security as a western stand-off with Iran over its nuclear programme propels the price of oil ever higher.

Although most oil pumped in the Middle East by Gulf nations goes to Asia, fears over interruptions to production and exports in the region still send prices climbing in North America. London oil futures have risen 17 per cent since the start of the year. And Opec, which pumps 40 per cent of the world's oil, holds the key influence over prices by controlling its flow of oil to the market.

Canada's aim is to counterbalance Opec by pumping more oil from the tar sands - thick, pungent stuff that gives up its crude only through an expensive and high-emissions process - and catering to Opec's best customers in China and other fast-growing economies.

"It's going to have geopolitical implications," says Mr Oliver. "The future energy supply is going to be profoundly affected by what are now called unconventional sources. The influence of Opec on a relative basis is likely to decrease. And I think overall this is going to be positive for the West."

First brought to attention by a fur trader in 1778, the tar sands began receiving significant investment from the oil majors only in 2006. Foreign companies including the Chinese powerhouse Sinopec, Houston's ExxonMobil and Norway's Statoil have since led investment there. Abu Dhabi National Energy, the energy company also known as Taqa, holds stakes in more traditional oilfields in Canada but plans to invest about US$600 million (Dh2.2 billion) across North America this year.

Canada's hydrocarbon revolution mirrors another across the border.

"We're producing more oil every year," Daniel Poneman, the American deputy energy secretary, told reporters in Kuwait. "Our imports have gone down, and we are now importing less than 50 per cent for the first time in 13 years."

Natural gas trapped in American shale formations is being freed up thanks to hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" - shooting fluid at high pressure into the rock to create more channels for the gas to travel out.

The technique has been so successful that it has pushed the price of gas in the US from levels last year of about $4 per million British thermal units to $2.50 today. The cheaper fuel has slowed the growth of America's other low-cost power source, nuclear plants, and sparked the conversion of at least one gas import terminal into an export operation. But the tar sands and shale gas are lightning rods for the ire of environmental activists.

In December, Canada became the first nation to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement binding developed and transitioning nations to curb carbon emissions to keep the rise in the Earth's temperature to 2 degrees C.

When Canada signed the protocol 15 years ago, West Texas Intermediate, the American crude benchmark, cost $18 a barrel. Oil is now above $100 a barrel, encouraging advances in technologies to extract oil. Carbon emissions have also risen, by 24.1 per cent between 1990 and 2008.

"At the end of the day the oil sands are a technology project. Without technological improvement we couldn't have extracted it, we couldn't have extracted it at the same price, we couldn't have reduced the environmental footprint," says Mr Oliver, adding that the contribution of the sands to the Earth's rise in temperature would be a fraction of the world's total. "We're talking about 3 per cent of 1 degree C, when all the oil sands commercially available would be developed - which currently would take 300 years. But let's say we triple production. It's going to take over 100 years. Three per cent of one degree - minuscule. So what are people so fussed about?"

Central to Canada's oil ambitions is the Keystone XL pipeline, a controversial plan to pipe oil over a 2,700-kilometre path from Alberta's Canadian oil sands to storage hubs in the US.

Although Republican politicians in the US have described the pipeline as essential to domestic energy security, environmentalists worry about the possible contamination of Nebraskan aquifers and carbon emissions from the tar sands extraction itself.

The film director James Cameron and the outdoors chronicler Bill McKibben are among the celebrities who lent publicity to the environmentalist campaign.

"The emissions from coal-fired electricity in the state of Wisconsin is equal to all the oil sands," says Mr Oliver. "You don't see the Hollywood stars running to Wisconsin in protest.

"Environmental groups have seized the agenda. They were quick off the mark and there's an emotional appeal and sometimes they're a bit footloose and fancy with the facts."

In January, the Obama administration rejected the Keystone XL proposal. Mr Oliver characterised the blockage as "temporary" and said Canada would seek out customers in China, South Korea and other growing Asian economies in addition to the US.

A bottleneck in the American oil storage hub of Cushing, Oklahoma, has helped to contribute to a discount of about $20 on the American oil benchmark to the European benchmark, Brent. That would lead to lost income of C$140bn (Dh518.3bn) over 25 years, economists estimate.

"Basically we have been selling all our energy to the United States, so we have one customer," says Mr Oliver. "The other fundamental issue of course is that our resources are more than the United States wants or needs. Well then, the Asia-Pacific market is beckoning and China is the biggest consumer of energy in the world.

"We have been traditionally trading with countries that now have lower growth rates than the other countries where energy needs are increasing dramatically. So we simply have to diversify our customer base."

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