The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

It was northern Alberta, not Noril’sk. Beneath me sprawled the open sores of the Athabasca Tar Sands, economic engine of Fort McMurray and almost one-half of the Canadian oil industry. Though they are more commonly called “oil sands,” what they hold is nothing like conventional oil. The pure, light, sweet crude pumped with ease from Saudi oil fields is a dream compared to this stuff. It is tarlike bitumen, a low-grade, sulfur-rich, hydrogen-poor hydrocarbon that has soaked into vast expanses of Alberta sandstone.

Extracting liquid oils from this mess is an extraordinarily invasive, consumptive, and environmentally damaging process. At present, the most common way to do it is strip mining, with about two tons of tar sand needed to obtain a single barrel of oil. Gigantic trucks and shovels scrape the stuff off the surface. Then it is crushed and dumped onto conveyor belts heading to swirling tubs of water. The resulting slurry is piped to an extraction facility, where it is churned in a heated witches’ brew of steam, water, and caustic soda. This splits the bitumen from the sand and clay, which sink to the bottom. The bitumen floats off to an “upgrader” (a sort of refinery) to remove sulfur and add hydrogen (from natural gas), creating synthetic crude oil. The waste liquid and dirt are sent to tailings ponds; the yellow blocks of sulfur are simply stacked up.⁴¹⁷

Tar sands are an environmentalist’s nightmare. The extraction process gobbles enormous quantities of energy and water. Migratory birds land in the tailings ponds and die.⁴¹⁸ Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates are released into the air alongside up to three times more greenhouse gas than released by conventional oil drilling. Depending on the technology used, it takes 2-4 cubic meters of water, and 125-214 cubic meters of natural gas, to produce a single cubic meter of synthetic oil.

The water is pumped from groundwater or diverted from the Athabasca River, reducing inflow to the Peace-Athabasca Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Ramsar wetland, about 150 kilometers downstream.⁴¹⁹ Most mines will operate for about forty years and excavate about a hundred square kilometers of land. No tailings ponds have ever been fully reclaimed, and putting the overburden back afterward mitigates the damage but does not really restore the original ecosystem. Since 1967, when the first mining began, only one square kilometer has been certifiably restored and returned to the public.⁴²⁰ These and other problems have environmental organizations yowling against any further increase in tar sands production.

They face a difficult battle. Short of being outlawed, it’s hard to imagine how the growth of this industry will ever stop. The oil reserves the tar sands contain are estimated at an astonishing 175 billion barrels which, if correct and recoverable, is the second-largest oil endowment on Earth after Saudi Arabia (estimated at 264 billion barrels). That means Alberta holds more oil than Iraq (115 billion barrels), Kuwait (102 billion), Venezuela (99 billion), Russia (79 billion), or Norway (7.5 billion). The cost to produce it has dropped from thirty-five dollars per barrel in 1980 to twenty dollars per barrel in recent years, making even fifty-dollars-per-barrel oil prices very profitable.⁴²¹ Huge new supplies of natural gas, needed for energy and hydrogen, will come online with construction of the Mackenzie Gas Project, a long-anticipated 1,220-kilometer pipeline that will carry Arctic gas from the Mackenzie Delta area to the tar sands and other North American markets. ⁴²² History tells us that Canada’s adherence to international climate-change treaties crumbles before market forces like these: The tar sands are the biggest reason why Canada not only failed to meet her pledged reduction in carbon dioxide emissions under the Kyoto Protocol (to -6% below 1990 levels), but actually grew them +27% instead.⁴²³

So far, about 530 square kilometers have been strip-mined, an area not much greater than the city of Edmonton. But tar sands underlie a staggering 140,000 square kilometers of Alberta, nearly one-fourth of the province and about the size of Bangladesh. Of this large area, about 20%—sixty more Edmontons—are shallow enough for strip mining. The rest can be exploited using underground extraction, which involves injecting 450°F pressurized steam underground for several years to heat the ground, eventually fluidizing the tar enough to pump some of it out.⁴²⁴ This type of underground extraction has the potential to spread across nearly all of northern Alberta. If it does, new pipelines, roads, and towns must follow.

This future springs not simply from my fertile imagination but from cold, hard cash. Those 175 billion barrels of grubby bitumen lie right next door to the world’s largest and friendliest customer, whose other suppliers have either entered decline or soon will. Energy companies are no fools. By early 2009 the government of Canada had already leased more than seventy-nine thousand square kilometers in tar sands contracts. Future production is anticipated to rise from 1.3 million barrels per day today, to 3.5 million by 2018, to 6 million barrels per day by 2040.⁴²⁵ If that black torrent of tar becomes reality, its flow will be nearly ten times greater than the amount of conventional oil flowing south from Alaska’s North Slope today.

America is ready and waiting.

The visual image of Canadian oil flowing from north to south is exactly the right one to hold in mind. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it passes over U.S. borders unencumbered by tariff. And compared to the world’s other geopolitical relationships, America and Canada remain two countries in a happy marriage.

Their embrace far transcends the energy industry. It is just one part of a bigger cross-border dependency that has long existed, thanks to friendly borders and the geographic proximity of their neighboring population cores, as described earlier. But this lovers’ gaze has not always been so transfixed. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Canada was focused more on domestic integration than the cross-border sort.

A serious schism was fractious Quebec, the French-Canadian province with a long history of separatist movements and terrorism. A wave of bombings by terrorist cells of the Front de Liberation du Quebec culminated in 1970 with the kidnapping of two government officials, one of whom—Minister of Labor Pierre Laporte—was found strangled and dumped in the trunk of a car. The 1970s also marked the emergence of aboriginal rights movements and rising economic and political power in Canada’s energy-rich western provinces. Debate was raging over a national bilingualism policy. During this period of history most Canadians were focused on bridging their country’s internal cultural divisions, not furthering its integration with the United States.

The New Cascadians

But the passage of NAFTA in 1994 marked the beginning of a stunning reorientation in Canada’s political and economic geography. It quickly began to integrate in a north-south direction with parts of the United States, rather than in the old east-west orientation across Canada. Very recent studies of this phenomenon are discovering it runs far deeper than simply increased cross-border trade and traffic; there is an actual melding of cross-border economies under way.⁴²⁶ This is not being steered by Ottawa and Washington but rather by a proliferation of cross-border networks of business groups, chambers of commerce, NGOs, mayors’ councils, and other forms of grassroots enterprise.

The end result of this north-south reorientation is the emergence of new cross-border “super-regions” with distinct economic footprints and cultural auras of their own. Names are even being floated for two of them. “Cascadia” refers to the melding economies of the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, centered on the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland corridor. “Atlantica” links upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine with Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island.⁴²⁷ A key super-region is the Toronto- Hamilton-Detroit corridor integrating southern Ontario—the industrial heart of Canada—with Michigan’s automotive industry and manufacturing sectors in Indiana, Ohio, and other Midwestern states.

For each of these emerging super-regions, the two respective halves across the U.S.-Canada border are also knitting culturally. New surveys reveal that the social values of Atlantic Canada now resemble those of the U.S. East Coast, whereas those of Alberta and British Columbia now resemble those of the western United States.⁴²⁸ Apparently, proximal Canadians and Americans identify better with each other than with their own countrymen living farther away. In North America big doors are opening wide along this long border, with the widest hallways running north and south.

The Friendly Globalizers