Excel Aqua Resource Center

We’ve created a world run on fossil fuels, particularly oil. The world is hungry for it and is willing to create war to get it. It is an insatiable appetite that grows by the day and must be satiated at all costs. The prime example is the Alberta Tar Sands where a million barrels of crude are produced from the many processing plants there every day. The great cost has been to the environment.
The damage is staggering. It is an environmental disaster zone of mammoth proportions. Not only is the land in very critical condition the processing plants are so huge that they create their own weather systems. The air is sooty and grey.
What was once a pristine green landscape is now erased to be replaced with a black disaster beyond description. For as far as the eye can see is a surreal landscape of huge extraction and refining plants belching black smoke and fire, huge, deep strip mines and mammoth tailing ponds held in check by some of the world’s largest dams. Heartbreaking, doesn’t even come close to a description of the environmental damage, especially on such a massive scale.
For over a century, experts and engineers have been trying to figure out how to exploit the bitumen and convert it into synthetic crude oil. Bitumen is a thick, tar-like hydrocarbon that is the base of the refining process.
In the mid 1990’s, the bit monolithic oil companies moved in and began the process of creating one of the world’s biggest environmental disasters. The first major expansion began in 1996 and is expected to reach a production level of 4 to 5 million barrels of oil per day by the year 2020. Close to $100 billion has already been spent on infrastructure, extraction and refining with not a single cent spent of repairing the environmental damage. This is an amazing revelation because in the early 1990’s not a single penny of investment was even conceived for the area and oil was selling for less than $20 per barrel.
There is so much oil there that production is not going to stop anytime soon. It requires a tremendous amount of water and other resources to keep the tar sands project going. It would be nice if there was a plan to clean up the mess and restore it to near its original condition. It would be a shame if our children inherited this nightmare.