Oil dependency - It’s time for radical move on energy

IT’S hard to imagine that anything happening at 56°44’N by 111°07’W, in a place where the temperature barely rises above freezing for months on end, has much relevance to the lives we live on the watery edge of Europe.

But in Fort McMurray, in the Canadian province of Alberta, there is a 21st century Klondike in full flow. Nature is being confronted tooth-and-claw with the latest technology and huge financial resources corporate oil can muster. Man is bringing all his ingenuity, determination and single-mindedness to bear on extracting oil from the sticky sands of what was once, but never will be again, an arctic desert. In the kind of oil boom that hasn’t been seen for generations in North America oilmen are digging up soil saturated with black gold.

Just how much oil the Canadian government-owned land contains is a matter of conjecture, but a widely accepted estimate is 1.7 trillion barrels (of which 170 billion are recoverable at today’s prices and with current technology), spread across 87,600 square miles of forest and bog. Compare those figures with Saudi Arabia’s 260 billion barrels, which accounts for 24% of the world’s reserves, and it is easy to understand why the big oil companies are rushing to Fort McMurray.