I’m not defending the oil sands industry as a preferred source of energy; and the environmental issues surrounding the GHG emissions are very real. The local environmental impacts may be a bit overblown in some areas, however.
Allegations of river and groundwater contamination are contested and may be exaggerated. There is evidence that hydrocarbons have been leaching into water-ways for millennia, regardless of oil-sands extraction. In one bizarre sense, extracting the oil from the sand is sort of a “clean-up”.
The scale of the operations is vast by mining standards and they are extremely ugly, but the total active area is still smaller than the incremental amount by which the city of Toronto expands every year.
Rehabilitation of the tailings (sand from which the oil is removed) is difficult and it takes a long time (years) for the sands to re-consolidate so that revegetation is possible. In the meantime they’re pretty nasty more-or-less dead bogs. Bird kills (birds land on what looks to be a firm surface and get stuck) are an ongoing issue.
