This is ultimately about Tar Sands oil production coming out of Alberta Canada, the dirtiest, costliest oil imagineable. Why? The Argus recently ran a story about Sioux Falls water useage, interestingly enough, a day after I was at a “Green Drinks” gathering at the Museum For Visual Arts last Thursday night about Hyperion oil. Sioux Falls uses 16 million gallons of water per day, 102 gallons per capita. And local water rates are on the rise. They will surely rise much faster if we get Hyperion on board down in Elk Point. Hyperion will suck up 12 million gallons a day on already stressed aquifers, and much of that water will either end up toxic, or dumped into the river for downstream communities to worry about. Much like we did recently with our own “Shitgate” when we dumped raw sewage into the river.
Hyperion pales in comparison though to the water numbers from its partner in crime in Alberta Canada. The Alberta provincial government granted tar sands oil producers the license to withdraw 172 billion gallons for mining and processing per year. Thats over 471 MILLION gallons a day. 90% of that water, or 424 million gallons a day is lost to wastewater slurry ponds as toxic waste. That is 27 times as much water as the entire population of Sioux Falls uses in a day that is rendered forever toxic each day in Tar Sand production.
So, ripping a pipeline through South Dakota is one thing, the hundreds of billions of gallons of fresh water turned toxic is another.
Get used to this as we reach and pass peak oil. Governments and oil companies are going to expend more and more resources to drill out harder-to-reach oil reserves which will produce less. We’re just about out of the “easy oil” on this planet. As we have to spend more energy drilling out the “hard oil”, energy prices will rise dramatically and worldwide supply will either plateau or start to decline.
This current “recession” may not be so easy to recover from as we thought. We should be thinking very hard, RIGHT NOW, about how our communities are going to survive in a world with much less cheap energy available.
This is ultimately about Tar Sands oil production coming out of Alberta Canada, the dirtiest, costliest oil imagineable. Why? The Argus recently ran a story about Sioux Falls water useage, interestingly enough, a day after I was at a “Green Drinks” gathering at the Museum For Visual Arts last Thursday night about Hyperion oil. Sioux Falls uses 16 million gallons of water per day, 102 gallons per capita. And local water rates are on the rise. They will surely rise much faster if we get Hyperion on board down in Elk Point. Hyperion will suck up 12 million gallons a day on already stressed aquifers, and much of that water will either end up toxic, or dumped into the river for downstream communities to worry about. Much like we did recently with our own “Shitgate” when we dumped raw sewage into the river.
Hyperion pales in comparison though to the water numbers from its partner in crime in Alberta Canada. The Alberta provincial government granted tar sands oil producers the license to withdraw 172 billion gallons for mining and processing per year. Thats over 471 MILLION gallons a day. 90% of that water, or 424 million gallons a day is lost to wastewater slurry ponds as toxic waste. That is 27 times as much water as the entire population of Sioux Falls uses in a day that is rendered forever toxic each day in Tar Sand production.
So, ripping a pipeline through South Dakota is one thing, the hundreds of billions of gallons of fresh water turned toxic is another.
Get used to this as we reach and pass peak oil. Governments and oil companies are going to expend more and more resources to drill out harder-to-reach oil reserves which will produce less. We’re just about out of the “easy oil” on this planet. As we have to spend more energy drilling out the “hard oil”, energy prices will rise dramatically and worldwide supply will either plateau or start to decline.
This current “recession” may not be so easy to recover from as we thought. We should be thinking very hard, RIGHT NOW, about how our communities are going to survive in a world with much less cheap energy available.