How much fresh water does the Alberta tar sands use?
The website did not give an actual amount but it did say the oil sands uses less than 1% of the average annual flow of the athabasca river. So I tried a few times to get the river flow amount from http://www.wsc.ec.gc.ca/ applications/H2O/index-eng.cfm?stype=station but it either gave an error or timed out when searching.
So I went with wikipedia (who refrenced the above website) so the flow of the Athabasca is 623 m3/s and there is 31,556,926 seconds in a year so the annual flowthru of water would be 19,659,964,898 m3. Now they say that less than 1% of that is used by the tar sands to extract oil. How much less? who knows. I will split the difference and say .5% which is 98,299,824.47 m3 or 98,299,824,470 Liters (98 Billion L)of fresh water used a year or 269,314,587.59 Liters (269 Million L) used per day. Epcor and the city of Edmonton websites could not tell me how much water the city of edmonton uses on a daily basis but it did say the average person uses 230 L per day. And since the edmonton Metropolitain area has 1,155,383 citizens that would mean we use 265,738,090 L (265 Million L) per day.
So every man woman and child in the Edmonton area use less water than what is used for the tar sands. That is of course an approximation since the oil sands information website does not directly or acuratley state how much water is used. if we change the calculations to the upper end of 1% we are looking at all the water used by people in Edmonton and Calgary and if we up it to 1.4% which is a number I heard may be the enviromental limit set by government then we would be looking at water consumption at the same level as everybody in Alberta. On this issue alone I see the oil sands as an enviromental disaster. Not to mention the tailings ponds, as eventually all this water will end up there.
We are going to end up with huge lakes of sludge. Of course you may say "But Jody, we need to brutally rape our province to make money. Our economy would collapse with out the oil industry. How do we maintain our standard of living here without our largest industry?" First off it is a non-Renewable energy. We will eventually run out and then we will be totally screwed. This will probablly not happen in our lifetime but it will at some point happen. "Screw the grandkids I want that new Ford F-150." You say. Ok that would be a poor attitude but how about instead we start taxing the oil company's at higher and higher rates which would slowly drive them out of the province. We than take that tax money and invest it into R&D of renewable energy and general technology. We could then build and promote a local high tech based economy. Germany sunk a bunch of money into renewable energy technology and it is paying back great divedends. Germany is now one of the very few EU economy's that isn't in crisis. I would like the world to be just a bit better off because of me. If I blindly accept what I am told by the Government and the oil corporations and do not question the possibility that they are motivated by greed or if I convince myself there is nothing I can do about it anyway, I don't think that helps make the world better in fact it probably makes it worse.
