Former Imperial Oil scientist, Clement Bowman is one of the chemical engineers who helped unlock the commercial potential of Canada's oil sands and he's now saying [1] that the Canadian government must urgently take the necessary steps to clean up the huge environmental impacts of the oil sands projects.

Unless they're solved, a number of us feel the oil sands have almost hit a wall," says Brown.

The Canadian Oil Sands projects, located mainly in the Northern region of the province of Alberta, have major negative impacts on the environment, [2] including:

• Oil Sands operations could eventually cover 149,000 square kilometers of pristine forest - that's an area roughly the size of Florida.

   

• Each day the oil sands use 600 million cubic feet of natural gas to, in effect, melt the tarry sludge into a usable form - that's enough natural gas to heat more than 3 million Canadian homes.

   

• Producing a barrel of oil from the tar sands produces three times more greenhouse gas than a barrel of conventional oil.

   

• Oil sands operations use about the same amount of freshwater in a year that the entire City of Calgary uses (population 1 million) - 90% of this freshwater ends up in toxic tailing ponds.

   

• Toxic tailing ponds already cover more than 50 square kilometers and are considered to be one of largest man-made structures in the world.

This all coming at the same time that the Alberta Government has launched a $25 million PR offensive to dispel the "myths" [3] surrounding the environmental impacts the Alberta Oil Sands are having on our planet.