Hahaha, and this is just the extraction phase, and just for air quality. there are many other potential vectors of contaminantion that can cause an issue (groundwater, geochemistry).

We aren’t even talking about when it comes to closure and the effort needed to properly close an oil sands mine, assuming they don’t walk away before we actually get to closure.

The estimated reclamation liability(cleanup cost) for the oil sands is 200 billion dollars. Alberta currently has checks notes 2 billion in reclamation bonding for the oil sands…

So we have a mostly landlocked, massively polluting industry, with insane operating costs, selling their product at discount on a volatile market controlled by a cartel (OPEC). DEFINITELY too big to fail, right?

Right guys?

Like we certainly won’t be stuck with 198 billion in clean up… Which translates to 40k for every man, woman and child in Alberta. Right guys?

Guise?

Guise?

What do you mean worse than we though? This is worse than the lying companies said it would be.

I expected it to be even worse and expect even more dire news in the future.

The worst part is that the EROI (Energy Return On Investment) is very low as well. It’s around 3x compared to something like 30x for conventional oil sources. So not only is it polluting as heck, it’s also comparatively inefficient. If they had to pay for externalities, there’s absolutely no chance it’d be profitable.