Oil Giant BP's Role in 'Biggest Environmental Crisis'

In 1997, after British Petroleum publicly acknowledged the harmful effects of global warming, it quickly became known as the oil company with environmental virtue.

While other oil corporations argued that climate change didn't exist -- most notably Exxon Mobil, which funded around 40 public policy groups that disputed the scientific grounds for global warming -- BP was investing in emission reductions, going so far as to support the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement established to curb greenhouse gases, which took effect in 2005.

In 2005, BP Alternative Energies announced it would manage an investment program in solar and wind technologies, one that could amount to $8 billion over seven years. The company also marketed itself as an environmentally friendly oil corporation dedicated to moving "beyond petroleum."

But a recent change in corporate policy threatens that green-friendly image. It's a policy that Greenpeace calls "the biggest environmental crime in history."

The policy involves BP breaking its long-standing, self-imposed ban on the production of crude oil from tar sands -- which are a combination of clay, sand, various minerals and bitumen -- found in the Canadian wilderness.

The process of extracting and refining tar sands -- also known as Canadian crude -- involves strip-mining a 50,000-square-mile span of forest (approximately the size of Florida) located in the western Canadian province of Alberta. The region contains an estimated 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

BP's decision to tap into the Canadian wilderness is "based on addiction, not reality," says Ann Alexander, senior attorney at the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit environmental group. "Tar sands crude oil is dirty from start to finish. It's bad enough that [BP is] fouling our natural resources here in the Midwest, but it's completely destroying them up in Canada. There are good sources of energy we can turn to that don't involve turning entire forests into a moonscape."

For oil corporations hoping to extract crude from the area, access is often a major hurdle. Bitumen is thick, which means tar sands can't be pumped from the ground the same way traditional oil is. Tar sands need to be mined, and the deeper they are beneath the earth's surface, the more difficult -- and harmful -- the extraction.

In Alberta's case, nearly 80 percent of the oil lays so deep underground that it needs to be either injected with steam or put through a "fireflood" process, which introduces compressed air to the bitumen and burns the oil for better flow. To extract a single barrel of bitumen from tar sands requires an energy input of 250 cubic feet of natural gas.

The first step, then, involves razing vast amounts of wilderness for open-pit mining -- meaning that small plants, trees and topsoil must be extracted by the ton. And because five barrels of water are typically needed to produce a single barrel of crude, surrounding rivers must be routed to the pits, then re-routed to man-made lakes of toxic sludge.

But the leveling of the Canadian wilderness is only the beginning. Once the forest and wildlife are out of the way and the pits have been dug, the raw process of extraction requires substantial manpower, heavy machinery (some of which can be up to three stories tall and weigh as much as a jetliner) and an incredible amount of energy. And that's to produce only a single barrel of unrefined crude oil from two tons of tar sands.

Also, because of the machinery involved, tar sand extraction generates up to four times more carbon dioxide than conventional drilling. Over the next seven years, global warming pollutants released into the atmosphere from tar sands oil production are projected to quintuple to 126 megatons, up from 25 megatons in 2003, according to the Pembina Institute, a nonprofit environmental group based in Canada.