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Scientific American: The fate of the Alberta’s tar sands mines—and the climate—may come down to the Keystone XL pipeline

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=oil-sands-may-irrevocably-tar-the-climate
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Pay Dirt: How to Turn Tar Sands into Oil [Slide Show]

July 2013 Scientific American Magazine: Oil Sands May Irrevocably Tar the Climate

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OIL MINING: Alberta’s tar sands region is one of the few places in the world where oil can be dug out of the ground.
Image: GARTH LENZ

By David Biello

In Brief

Turning tar sands into oil and burning it as fuel produce enormous amounts of carbon dioxide.
To prevent an average global temperature increase of more than two degrees Celsius, triggering potentially catastrophic climate change, cumulative carbon emissions must be kept below one trillion metric tons.
The earth’s atmosphere is already more than halfway to the trillion-metric-ton target; expanding production of even more tar sands would accelerate emissions.
If built, the Keystone XL pipeline will be a spigot that speeds tar sands production, pushing the planet toward its emissions limit.

Red lights are flashing, but Ben Johnson pays them no mind. The long, lean, weathered engineer rests against a counter lined with computer monitors, describing life in the tar sands mines of Alberta, Canada. His task is to take a mud made of ore and water and “liberate the bitumen,” a tarlike oil that can be refined into conventional crude oil. He and two colleagues man a monitoring station that sits near the base of a cone-shaped structure the size of a three-story building. Mud and hot water flow into the middle of the inverted funnel. Bitumen rises to the top and spills over onto surrounding grates.

One time in 2012 bitumen bubbled up so fast that it cascaded down the sides of the cone and flooded the building shin high. To keep this kind of thing from happening again, sensors track temperatures, pressures and other parameters, and if something is amiss, a warning goes off. This happens so often—“1,000 alarms a day,” Johnson says—that the engineers have taken to keeping the sound turned off. “It’s not going ‘bing, bing, bing,’” he says, “because that would drive us crazy.”

Suncor Energy’s North Steepbank mine, where Johnson operates one of many “separator cells,” is a tiny portion of the current output of Alberta’s tar sands, which underlie an area the size of Florida. High oil prices over the past decade have made such tar sands mines profitable, and Canada has rapidly expanded production. In 2012 alone Alberta exported more than $55 billion worth of oil, mostly to the U.S., so it is no wonder that Johnson’s crew does not pause for alarms.

The rush to exploit the Alberta tar sands is triggering alarms of another kind, however—from climate scientists. Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are driving the world quickly toward a greenhouse gas threshold—an atmospheric concentration of 450 parts per million, which corresponds to two degrees Celsius or more of warming—beyond which some scientists fear that climate change could prove catastrophic. Coal constitutes a bigger source of fossilized carbon, but the Alberta sands require more energy to mine and refine than conventional oil, adding an extra overhead in greenhouse gas emissions. And the tar sands operations are growing far more quickly than most other sources of oil. Releasing the carbon now trapped in the tar sands would most likely dash any hope of avoiding the two degree C threshold.

The fate of Alberta’s tar sands—and the climate, for that matter—now seems to be converging on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Keystone XL, which would run from Alberta to refineries in Texas along the Gulf of Mexico, would serve as a primary conduit for tar sands crude. For a decade or more advocates of Alberta’s operations have argued that the tar sands constitute a much needed source of oil for the U.S. that is not subject to turmoil in the Middle East and abroad. All that was needed was a way to transport the tar sands oil from Canada to where it would be used—to the U.S. and beyond to Europe and Asia. And if a pipeline like Keystone XL could not be built, then other pipelines or rail could do as well. But independent experts suggest that Keystone XL is critical to the continued growth of Alberta’s tar sands industry.

None of this had come to light when President Barack Obama postponed a decision on whether to build the Keystone XL pipeline during his reelection campaign. When the issue comes up again, a great deal more will be riding on his decision.

The Trillionth Tonne

Exposed to the bitter chill of a northern Alberta winter at an overlook above Suncor’s mine, I can’t help but think that a little global warming might be nice. The mine is located in an industrial expanse of boreal forest some 30 kilometers north of Fort McMurray, a boom town where rents run as high as Manhattan’s and truck drivers make $100,000 a year. Down below, along a gravel road, I can see a parade of Caterpillar 797Fs, the world’s largest trucks, each carrying a 400-metric-ton load of clumped tar sands. (Women drivers are highly sought because they are easier on the equipment, but they are hard to come by because men outnumber women three to one in town.) The trucks shuttle back and forth between massive electric-powered shovels and Johnson’s separation facility, a 40-minute round-trip.

The trucks dump the ore into an industrial grinder the size of a compact car, which feeds an oversized conveyor belt that brings the tar sands to the separation cell that Johnson helps to oversee. A chunk of ore can go from truck to liberated bitumen in a mere 30 minutes. This black and sticky but free bitumen froths from the top of the separator, is collected and then flows down a pipeline to a mini refinery, where it is cooked at high heat to remove carbon and create a hydrocarbon stew similar to crude oil. Alternatively, the bitumen is mixed with lighter hydrocarbons in squat, huge storage tanks; the resulting mixture, known as dilbit (for diluted bitumen), is liquid enough to flow on its own through long-distance pipelines like Keystone XL, bound for refineries in the U.S.

Suncor’s North Steepbank is only a small fraction of the world’s first tar sands mine—and just one of the company’s complex of mines, which together produce more than 300,000 barrels of oil a day. Suncor’s holdings make up about 30 percent of the total production from mining of the Alberta tar sands, which currently comes to nearly two million barrels a day—equal to the output of more than 80,000 oil wells and one twentieth of U.S. demand. The mines, with their vast lakes of toxic water residue and blocks of bright yellow elemental sulfur, are already big enough to see from space—an industrial patch steadily spreading in the boreal forest.

The invisible environmental impact of the mines may prove the most challenging, however. Avoiding the two degree C warming threshold means that humanity faces what some scientists have called a carbon budget: an estimated one-trillion-metric-ton limit on cumulative carbon emissions.

The carbon budget is the brainchild of physicist Myles Allen of the University of Oxford and six other scientists. In 2009 the team assembled observations of rising temperatures and plugged them into computer models of future climate change, which accounted for, among other things, the fact that CO2 persists in the atmosphere, continuing to trap heat, for centuries. Their one-trillion-metric-ton budget encompasses all the carbon that human activity can safely generate between now and the year 2050, if we are to stay below the warming threshold. It doesn’t matter how quickly we reach that limit. What matters is not exceeding it. “Tons of carbon is fundamental,” argues now retired nasa climatologist James E. Hansen, who has been testifying about climate change since 1988 and has recently been arrested at protests against the Keystone XL pipeline. “It does not matter much how fast you burn it.”

The source of that carbon does not matter, either. The world can burn through only a set amount of carbon-based fuels, whether tar sands, coal, natural gas, wood or any other source of greenhouse gases. “From the perspective of the climate system, a CO2 molecule is a CO2 molecule, and it doesn’t matter if it came from coal versus natural gas,” notes climate modeler Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science’s department of global ecology at Stanford University.

To date, burning fossil fuels, clearing forests and other activities have put nearly 570 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere—and more than 250 billion metric tons of CO2 just since the year 2000, according to Allen. Currently human activities emit about 35 billion metric tons of CO2 (9.5 billion metric tons of carbon) a year, a figure that is steadily climbing, along with the global economy. By Allen’s calculations, at present rates society will emit the trillionth metric ton of carbon sometime during the summer of 2041. To stay on budget, on the other hand, emissions must drop by 2.5 percent a year, starting now.

Underground Treasure

Alberta’s tar sands represent a lot of buried carbon, the remains of countless algae and other microscopic life that lived hundreds of millions of years ago in a warm inland sea, pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere via photosynthesis. With today’s technology, about 170 billion barrels of oil could be recovered from Alberta’s tar sands, which would add roughly 25 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere if burned. An additional 1.63 trillion barrels of oil—which would add 250 billion metric tons of carbon—waits underground if engineers could figure out a way to separate every last bit of bitumen from the sand. “If we burn all the tar sands oil, the temperature rise just from burning those tar sands will be half of what we’ve already seen,” or roughly 0.4 degree C of global warming, notes mechanical engineer John P. Abraham of the University of St. Thomas–Minnesota.

Surface mining can reach deposits as deep as 80 meters, but that accounts for only 20 percent of the tar sands. In many places, the tar sands lie hundreds of meters underground, and energy firms have developed a method—known as in situ production—to melt out the bitumen in place.

In 2012 Cenovus Energy melted more than 64,000 barrels of underground bitumen every day at Christina Lake, a facility in Alberta named after nearby waters. The operation is one of the frontier camps of this latest tar sands boom. Clouds of steam rise from the nine industrial boilers on-site, burning natural gas to heat treated water into 350 degree C steam. Cenovus employees in a control room even bigger than Suncor’s inject the steam deep below the surface to melt the bitumen, which is then sucked back to the surface through a well and piped off for further processing. Greg Fagnan, Christina Lake’s director of operations, likens the complex to a giant water-processing facility “that happens to produce oil as well.” Every once in a while, a blowout shoots steam and partially melted tar sands into the sky, like one Devon Energy caused in the summer of 2010 by using too much pressure.

At Christina Lake, engineers inject roughly two barrels of steam to pump back out one barrel of bitumen. All that steam—and the natural gas burned to heat it—means melting bitumen results in two and a half times more greenhouse gas pollution than surface mining, itself among the highest emitters for any kind of oil production. Greater production by this melting method has caused greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta’s tar sands to rise by 16 percent since just 2009, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. In 2012, for the first time, underground production of tar sands in Alberta equaled that of surface mining, and thanks to efforts such as Christina Lake, it will soon become the primary mode of production.

In situ production works only for bitumen that is buried below 200 meters, however. That leaves a gap of 120 meters or so that is too deep for surface mining but too shallow for in situ. So far engineers have not figured out how to tap the gap, which means burning all the fuel contained in the tar sands deposits is an unlikely prospect at present.

Yet burning a significant portion of tar sands will go a long way toward blowing the planet’s carbon budget. The only way to do so and stay on budget would be to stop burning coal or other fossil fuels—or to find a way to drastically reduce tar sands’ greenhouse gas emissions. Neither prospect seems likely. Tar sands “emissions have doubled since 1990 and will double again by 2020,” argues Jennifer Grant, director of oil sands research at the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental group.

Keystone Connection

This carbon budget explains why Abraham, Caldeira and Hansen joined 15 other scientists to sign a letter to President Obama urging him to reject the proposed 2,700-kilometer-long Keystone XL pipeline. Building the pipeline—and thus enabling even more tar sands production—is “counter to both national and planetary interests,” the scientists wrote.

Obama, who postponed approval of the pipeline just before the 2012 presidential election, struck a climate-friendly note in his second inaugural address as well as his 2013 State of the Union speech. His decision on Keystone XL will come after the State Department releases its final report on the pipeline.

In a first draft of its report, the State Department downplayed the pipeline’s impact, both on the viability of the tar sands operations and on the environment. Keystone XL, it said, would be “unlikely to have a substantial impact” on greenhouse gas emissions. But the authors of the report seem to have assumed that if Keystone XL were not built, Canada would find some other economical way of transporting the oil to consumers.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a response in April that cast the matter in a different light. According to Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for epa’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, the State Department report relied on faulty economics, among other oversights. The epa, drawing on past experience with big environmental assessments, suggested that alternatives to Keystone XL were either significantly more costly or faced major opposition. Having to get by without Keystone XL, in other words, might constrain tar sands development. In May the International Energy Agency (IEA) confirmed this analysis in its own prediction for the tar sands.

Tar sands oil is already traveling south by train, but this is a stopgap measure. Moving tar sands by rail is three times more expensive than by pipeline at current rates. As the tar sands operations ramp up, rail alone could prove a prohibitive cost barrier to further development.

What about another pipeline, should Keystone XL fail? Canada has the option of going west to the Pacific Coast to reach supertankers bound for China. Or it could go east, through existing pipelines, to the Midwest or the Atlantic Coast. These options are problematic. A Pacific pipeline—the least viable choice—would have to traverse the Rocky Mountains, passing through land owned by First Nations and other native groups in British Columbia, who have opposed a pipeline for fear of spills and other impacts. An Atlantic pipeline could be cobbled together from pipelines that now link Alberta to the eastern coast of North America. Engineers would have to reverse the flow of oil, much as ExxonMobil did for the Pegasus pipeline, which now carries crude from Illinois to Texas. But older pipelines that have been reversed may be more prone to leaks. Pegasus, for instance, sprung a tar sands oil leak in Arkansas this past April. And retrofitting existing pipelines is likely to elicit strong protest from environmentalists and others.

Given these obstacles, the tar sands industry needs Keystone XL to further expand, according to the epa and IEA reports. At present, Alberta’s tar sands produce 1.8 million barrels of oil a day. Keystone XL would ship another 830,000 barrels daily.

Mindful of the environmental opposition, Alberta and energy firms have tried to minimize greenhouse gas pollution in the tar sands operations. Royal Dutch Shell is trying an expensive alternative to breaking down bitumen into oil that involves adding hydrogen, rather than cooking off carbon into pet coke, to reduce CO2 emissions. The international oil giant has also begun developing plans for adding carbon capture and storage equipment to one of its mini refineries, a project dubbed Quest. When completed in 2015, Quest will attempt to annually store deep underground one million metric tons of CO2, or roughly one third of the facility’s pollution. Another similar project plans to capture CO2 for use to flush more conventional oil out of the ground.

Alberta is also one of the only oil-producing regions in the world to have a tax on carbon. Currently capped at $15 per metric ton, discussions continue to potentially raise that price. The province has invested the more than $300 million collected to date in technology development, primarily to reduce CO2 emissions from the tar sands. The tax “gives us some ammunition when people attack us for our carbon footprint, if nothing else,” Ron Liepert, then Alberta’s minister of energy, told me in 2011.

Efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of the tar sands add further to the cost of extracting the oil and have not had a big impact on the carbon footprint. The 1.8 million barrels of tar sands oil a day produced in 2011 resulted in more than 47 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2011, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The IEA, in a 2010 analysis of ways to stay below the two degree C threshold, suggested that tar sands production in Alberta cannot exceed 3.3 million barrels a day by 2035. Yet mining already approved or under construction in Alberta could raise production to five million barrels a day by 2030. It’s hard to imagine how to mine the tar sands without blowing the carbon budget.

Breaking the Carbon Budget

Is it unfair to single out the tar sands? After all, other forms of fossil fuel add more to the world’s carbon budget, yet they do not draw as much ire. Perhaps they should. In 2011 U.S. coal-fired power plants emitted nearly two billion metric tons of greenhouse gases—roughly eight times the amount produced by mining, refining and burning tar sands. Many coal mines around the world create just as visible a scar on the landscape and an even bigger climate change legacy. Yet mines like those in Montana and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin are not the targets of high-profile protests such as those facing Keystone XL; protesters do not tie themselves to the tracks to block the kilometers-long trains that carry coal from the basin day after day. The U.S. Geological Survey suggests that basin alone holds 150 billion metric tons of coal that could be recovered with existing technology. Burning it all would send the world flying beyond any trillion-metric-ton carbon budget.

Australia’s plan to expand coal exports to Asia could add 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year when that coal is burned. That amount dwarfs emissions from even the most optimistic tar sands expansion. The U.S. and countries such as Indonesia are also planning coal expansions. Shutting down or even curtailing the U.S. coal industry would more than compensate for any tar sands development as a result of Keystone XL, although the two fossil fuels are used for different purposes—coal for electricity, oil for transportation.

Canada also offers a target of some convenience, given that it is a friendly democracy susceptible to environmental pressure. Producers of “heavy oil”—similar in pollution to tar sands bitumen—in Mexico, Nigeria or Venezuela do not find themselves under as much scrutiny despite high rates of CO2 pollution. In fact, scouring such heavy oil from an old field in California is the single worst CO2 polluter among all oil-extraction efforts in the world, including the melted tar sands. “If you think that using other petroleum sources [than tar sands] is much better, then you’re delusional,” says chemical engineer Murray Gray, scientific director of the Center for Oil Sands Innovation at the University of Alberta. “Increasing coal use worldwide gives me a lot more pause.”

These other sources of petroleum are not growing anywhere near as fast as Alberta’s oil sands, where in the past decade production increased by more than a million barrels a day. To keep to the atmospheric carbon budget, the world must produce less than half of the known and economically recoverable oil, gas and coal reserves. That means much of the fossil fuel—especially the dirtiest forms of petroleum, such as that produced from the tar sands—will have to stay buried.

Economic forces may come to the aid of the global environment. Fracking for oil in North Dakota’s portion of the Bakken Shale has begun to depress U.S. demand for Canada’s dirty oil; in response, new infrastructure projects in Alberta’s tar sands, such as the $12-billion Voyageur mini refinery, have been dropped. New mandatory fuel-efficiency standards for U.S. cars will reduce demand as well, at least in the short term. Regardless, the tar sands will be there, waiting, an ever tempting target for future extraction once the easier oil runs out.

If the Keystone XL pipeline is approved or other means are built to get the tar sands oil to China, exports could continue to rise, accelerating the invisible accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. Instead of reducing emissions by 2.5 percent a year, starting now—the effort Oxford physicist Allen calculates is necessary to keep the planet clear of the two degree C threshold—global greenhouse gas pollution will continue to increase. Every bit of carbon from burning fossil fuels—tar sands or otherwise—counts.

This article was originally published with the title Greenhouse Goo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

David Biello is an associate editor at Scientific American.

MORE TO EXPLORE

Warming Caused by Cumulative Carbon Emissions towards the Trillionth Tonne. Myles R. Allen et al. in Nature, Vol. 458, pages 1163–1166; April 30, 2009.

The Alberta Oil Sands and Climate. Neil C. Swart and Andrew J. Weaver in Nature Climate Change, Vol. 2, pages 134–136; February 19, 2012.

The Facts on Oil Sands. Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, 2013. Available as a PDF at www.capp.ca/getdoc.aspx?DocId=220513&DT=NTV

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
For a more in-depth look at tar sands production, visit ScientificAmerican.com/jul2013/tar-sands

read more at the link above………….

energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, Keystone XL, national ocean politics, natural resource management, tar sands

Environmental Action: Support the Walk for Our Grandchildren against Keystone XL

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https://secure3.convio.net/engage/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=8031

Elders March: click on the site above to sign up to support the 2013 Walk for our Grandchildren as they walk the 100 miles from Camp David to the White House to Say “No on Keystone XL!”

This elder-led, intergenerational march will begin July 21st and culminate in a rally July 27th in DC and is part of the Summer Heat series of climate actions. It will also feature the voices of youth like Nelson Kanuk, a Yup’ik native from Kipnuk, AK.

Add your message to the Walk participants, tell them how and why they are walking for you. Then stay tuned, we’ll keep you posted with their stories from the road.

climate change, fossil fuels, fracking, Keystone XL, national ocean politics

Common Dreams: Fracking: Causes Water Pollution, Global Warming, and now… ‘Earthquake Swarms’

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/12-4

Friday July 12th, 2013
New research shows that extent of damage caused by controversial gas drilling practice is worse than previously known
– Jon Queally, staff writer

frack_banner
Filmmaker Josh Fox (C) joins a protest against fracking in California, in Los Angeles in this May 30, 2013 file photo. (Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Though the main concerns of most anti-fracking activists continue to be the devastation to water quality, community health issues, and the role hydraulic fracture drilling plays in planetary global warming, a new study reveals that the practice can also have much larger impacts on another dangerous phenomenon: earthquakes.

It’s not news that gas drilling causes small, localized tremors around fracking sites, but new research presented by one of the top seismology labs in the world on Thursday shows how “swarms of minor earthquakes”—as Reuters reports—can lead to subsequent and larger ones with much more dire consequences.

Geologists have known for 50 years that injecting fluid underground can increase pressure on seismic faults and make them more likely to slip. The result is an “induced” quake.

A recent surge in U.S. oil and gas production – much of it using vast amounts of water to crack open rocks and release natural gas, as in fracking, or to bring up oil and gas from standard wells – has been linked to an increase in small to moderate induced earthquakes in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Ohio, Texas and Colorado.

Now seismologists at Columbia University say they have identified three quakes – in Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas – that were triggered at injection-well sites by major earthquakes a long distance away.

“The fluids (in wastewater injection wells) are driving the faults to their tipping point,” said Nicholas van der Elst of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, who led the study. It was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey.

As news of the the latest scientific findings reverberated in the news cycle, filmmaker and anti-fracking activist Josh Fox appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss their significance and discuss his latest film, Gasland 2, which takes an up-close look at the global fracking boom and the political economy of the gas industry that supports it.

Beyond the deeply troubling destruction that gas fracking has done to the communities where drilling has occurred—including the potential damage caused by earthquakes and injection wells—Fox emphasizes that the global impacts of natural gas on global warming should be of paramount concern.

“Moving from coal to fracked gas doesn’t give you any climate benefit at all,” Fox said in a pushback to claims that gas is less damaging to the climate than coal or oil. “So the plan should be about how we’re moving off of fossil fuels and onto alternate energy.”

Watch the full interview:

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energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, Keystone XL, national ocean politics, oil pollution

Treehugger.com: Exxon cites manufacturing defect for Arkansas oil spill, (raising more concerns…..)

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http://www.treehugger.com/energy-disasters/exxon-cites-manufacturing-defect-arkansas-oil-spill.html

Chris Tackett
Energy / Energy Disasters
July 11, 2013
Screen capture KATV

Exxon Mobil announced today that it believes a manufacturing defect is the cause of the pipeline rupture that spilled nearly 300,000 gallons of tar sands oil in Mayflower, Arkansas.

From the Exxon press statement:
Based on the metallurgical analysis, the independent laboratory concluded that the root cause of the failure can be attributed to original manufacturing defects – namely hook cracks near the seam.

Additional contributing factors include atypical pipe properties, such as extremely low impact toughness and elongation properties across the ERW [electric resistance welded] seam.

There are no findings that indicate internal or external corrosion contributed to the failure.

Their claim about there being no corrosion is important because there has been concern that the abrasive tar sands oil being transported in this pipeline may have contributed to the spill. The pipe was not originally designed to carry that type of fuel.

John Upton at Grist notes that this raises more concerns about the entire Pegasus pipeline, which was installed in the 1940s.
The findings bring into question the integrity of the entire Pegasus pipeline system – and other oil pipelines that crisscross the nation. The Pegasus system, which runs from Illinois to Texas, was laid in 1947 and 1948. The pipeline manufacturer, Ohio-based Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co., is no longer in business but was reportedly one of the leading suppliers of pipelines in the 1940s.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, Keystone XL, oil pollution, tar sands

Common Dreams: The Guardian/UK: Quebec’s Lac-Mégantic Oil Train Disaster Not Just Tragedy, But Corporate Crime

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/07/12
Published on Friday, July 12, 2013 by

At the root of the explosion is deregulation and an energy rush driving companies to take ever greater risks
by Martin Lukacs

megantic
The town burns following a train derailment and explosion in Lac Megantic, Quebec, early July 6, 2013. The train was hauling about 50,000 barrels of crude from North Dakota’s Bakken shale development to Irving Oil’s 300,000 barrel per day (bpd) plant in Saint John, New Brunswick. (REUTERS/Jean Gauthie)

Five days after a train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, the rural town resembles a scene of desolation. Its downtown is a charred sacrifice zone. 50 people are likely dead, making the train’s toll one of the worst disasters in recent Canadian history.

In the explosion’s aftermath, politicians and media pundits have wagged their finger about the indecency of “politicizing” the event, of grappling with deeper explanations. We can mourn, but not scrutinize. In April, prime minister Stephen Harper even coined an awkward expression – “committing sociology” – to deride the search for root causes about horrifying events, in the wake of an unrelated, alleged bombing attempt.

The recklessness of these corporations is no accident. Under the reign of neoliberalism over the last 30 years, governments in Canada and elsewhere have freed them from environmental, labor and safety standards and oversight, while opening up increasingly more of the public sphere for private profit-seeking.

But to simply call the Lac-Mégantic explosion a “tragedy” and to stop there, is to make it seem like an accident that occurred solely because of human error or technical oversight. It risks missing how we might assign broader culpability. And we owe it to the people who died to understand the reasons why such a disaster occurred, and how it might be prevented in the future.

So here’s my bit of unwelcome sociology: the explosion in Lac-Mégantic is not merely a tragedy. It is a corporate crime scene.

The deeper evidence about this event won’t be found in the train’s black box, or by questioning the one engineer who left the train before it loosened and careened unmanned into the heart of this tiny town. For that you’ll have to look at how Lac-Mégantic was hit by a perfect storm of greed, deregulation and an extreme energy rush driving companies to ever greater gambles with the environment and human life.

The crude carried on the rail-line of US-based company Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway – “fracked” shale oil from North Dakota – would not have passed through Lac-Mégantic five years ago. That’s because it’s part of a boom in dirty, unconventional energy, as fossil fuel companies seek to supplant the depletion of easy oil and gas with new sources – sources that are harder to find, nastier to extract, and more complicated to ship.

Like the Alberta tar sands, or the shale deposits of the United States, these energy sources are so destructive and carbon-intensive that leading scientists have made a straightforward judgment: to avert runaway climate change, they need to be kept in the ground. It’s a sad irony that Quebec is one of the few places to currently ban the “fracking” used to extract the Dakotan oil that devastated Lac-Mégantic.

But fossil fuel companies, spurred by record profits, have deployed a full-spectrum strategy to exploit and carry this oil to market. That’s one of the reasons for a massive, reckless increase in the amount of oil shipped by rail. In 2009, companies shipped a mere 500 carloads of crude oil by rail in Canada; this year, it will be 140,000.

Oil-by-rail has also proved a form of insurance against companies’ worst nightmare: a burgeoning, continent-wide movement to block pipelines from the Alberta tar sands. A group of Canadian businessmen is pursuing the construction of a 2,400-kilometre rail line that could ship 5m barrels of tar sands oil from Alberta to Alaska. Companies are also trucking it and entertaining the idea of barging it down waterways. This is the creed of the new energy era: by any means necessary.

The recklessness of these corporations is no accident. Under the reign of neoliberalism over the last 30 years, governments in Canada and elsewhere have freed them from environmental, labor and safety standards and oversight, while opening up increasingly more of the public sphere for private profit-seeking.

The railway in Canada has hardly been exempt. Up until the mid 1980s, the industry, publicly-run, was under serious regulation. By the time the Thatcherite Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney was finished with his reforms, it was deregulated, and companies had rewritten the safety rules. That launched an era of cost-cutting, massive lay-offs, and speed-ups on the job, and eventually, the full privatization of companies and rail-lines.

The Liberal government completed the job by turning over what regulation remained to rail companies themselves. A report issued in 2007 by a safety group spelled out the result: Canada’s rail system was a disaster in the waiting.

It’s little wonder, then, that today’s oil and rail barons have cut corners with ease. They’ve been using old rail cars to ship oil, despite the fact that regulators warned the federal government they were unsafe, as far back as 20 years ago. A more recent report by a federal agency reminded the government that the cars could be “subject to damage and catastrophic loss of hazardous materials.” All were ignored. To top it off, the federal government gave the go-ahead last year to Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway to operate with just one engineer aboard their trains.

All of which means it will not suffice to find out if a brake malfunctioned the night of the disaster, or limit ourselves to pointing at the failings of lax regulation. The debate should be about the need for another kind of brake, over the mad pursuit of infinite resources, and the unshackling of reckless corporations, on a finite and fragile planet.

Canada’s political class will not be pleased by the lessons to be drawn. The government needs to get back into the business of heavily regulating corporations – through incentives, through taxes, and through sanctions. And this will involve not just grappling with the dangers of the transport of oil – which will remain unsafe, whether by rail or by pipeline – but starting a rapid transition away from an extreme energy economy entirely. That will not happen as the result of any government inquiry, but a noisy social movement that puts it on the public agenda.

That’s why the most fitting response to Lac-Mégantic actually happened two weeks ago, by US residents 100 miles across the border in Fairfield, Maine. They were arrested blockading a train carrying the same fracked oil from the same oilfields of Northern Dakota, to the same refinery in New Brunswick, Canada. Their message was about ending our reliance on oil, not soon but now. For those who never knew the victims of Lac-Mégantic, there could be no better way to honor them.