The Keystone North Pole? Canada Mulls a Tar Sands Pipeline Through the Arctic

One of the proposed routes for Canada’s Arctic pipeline. Image: Google Maps

Call it the Keystone North Pole. Canada recently revealed that it is considering building a giant pipeline to pump heavy, unconventional tar sands oil through some of the most remote and pristine wilderness on the planet. What could go wrong?

Nothing at all. Oil pipelines have been scientifically proven to be invincible and beloved by all. Especially the ones filled with tar sands. With the sole exception of the fact that a simple rupture in a tar sands pipeline running through Arkansas turned a sunny suburb into an Orwellian dystopia for a month and counting now. Or that Exxon, which owned and operated the pipeline, still cannot answer basic questions about how and why it ruptured. 

Now imagine running a pipeline like that one through miles and miles of untrammeled wilderness, with few easy access routes for emergency responders, and a pristine ecosystem instead of suburban families. 

Ken Hughes, Alberta’s environment minister has been “talking to the government of Canada’s Northwest Territories, which lie directly north of Alberta, about a pipeline to a port such as Inuvik or Tuktoyaktuk on the Beaufort Sea, a section of the Arctic Ocean,” Reuters reports. This despite the fact that the best analog to such a project in recent times is Shell’s effort to navigate the Arctic’s offshore oil potential, which resulted in rigs adrift, minor spillage, and all-around embarassing disaster.

Nonetheless, Alberta, which is home to the sprawling tar sands extraction project, has formally requested that a consultancy firm carry out a feasibility study for such a pipeline. But why? Why even try to ship the stuff through the perilous north, through rugged terrain to an even more rugged port smack dab in the middle of the Arctic?

Because Alberta is desperate. 

“We need access to tidewater, to the ocean, in order to secure world prices … any rational economic option will be explored, and this is part of our oil market diversification strategy,” Hughes told Reuters. And the new agency further explained why: “Delayed pipeline projects and an excess of supply mean Alberta’s heavy crude often has been selling at a deep discount to world prices.” 

The home of the tar sands is land-locked, and as far as can be from any viable port. It’d rather pump the oil south, via the Keystone XL, to refineries in Texas. Or westward, to oil ports in Vancouver. But activists have jammed up those plans. Yet Canada has become quite insistent on transforming itself into a bona fide petro-state as quickly as possible.  Despite the wealth of reasons—climatic and otherwise—that its carbon bomb should stay buried, Canada is desperately seeking ways to offload its black gold. 

It may very well be that the age of oil is ending; the vast wealth and fossil-fueled tradition may be agents of inertia now, prolonging a paradigm that is bound to crumble. The Keystone may eventually be approved, or someone may eventually build a 2,000 mile pipeline through the Arctic. But neither will happen tough, ugly, and opposed violently and vocally by wide swaths of the public. And that is because they are aware of both the alternatives and the consequences: We have electric cars, rail travel. Non-plastic options. We know climate change is looming, in our guts or somewhere, somehow, if not fully, 

Maybe Canada should recognize that the difficulty it’s having with offloading its onerous product is bound up in the times. Which, as a particularly astute Jewish hippie once said, happen to be a-changing.