BP Proves Beyond Petroleum Was Greenwashing

The tar sands are rightly called one of the world's greatest environmental crimes, as I've written. No company that invests in the Canadian tar sands can legitimately call itself green.

Yet BP, the oil company that lavished millions on advertising its move "Beyond Petroleum," announced this month it's putting $3 billion into this dirtiest of dirty fuels!

BP is buying a half-share of the ironically named Sunrise field:

"BP's move into oil sands is an opportunity to build a strategic, material position and the huge potential of Sunrise is the ideal entry point for BP into Canadian oil sands," said Tony Hayward, BP's group chief executive.

The company ultimately plans to produce 200,000 barrels of oil a day from the field.

Shame on you BP!

Just how bad are the tar sands environmentally? As The Independent explains:

The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK's entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty....

The oil rush is also scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of tonnes of plant life and top soil is scooped away in vast open-pit mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers -- up to five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas.

What does BP have to say about the environment in its press release?

The result will be the development of a major new Canadian oil field and the modernization and expansion of the Toledo refinery to allow far greater use of Canadian heavy oil and to increase clean fuels production by as much as 600,000 gallons a day.

Clean fuels?! Do they really think we are that ignorant and gullible?

Mike Hudema, the climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace in Canada, had a more accurate description:

By jumping into tar sands extraction it is taking part in the biggest global warming crime ever seen and BP's green sheen is gone.

If the tar sands are Beyond Petroleum, then BP should just stick with good old petrol for the sake of the planet and stop its greenwashing ads.

Comments

[yerro2004]

The break even price on oil extraction is closer to $45.

[radmul]

Bp comercials claim that natural gas is renewable energy so what did you really expect?

[realitytrumpsbull]

No 'shock and awe' here, BP doesn't stand for
'beyond petroleum', it stands for 'british
petroleum'. BP goes waaayyyy back, decades,
I don't know when they were founded, but
it's been a while now that they've been in
business, and likely they'll continue to
be in business for a while yet. But, there's
no law that says people have to keep buying
their products. I do want to give them credit
though, for at least trying to do something,
and they've got dollars that can be pointed
toward supporting green technology.
I think they can keep using their oil products
to make great things like insulation, reusable
plastic products, it's just the fuels where
people have to talk and look and think. We
BURN so much oil every day, it's not even funny
and even they recognize it because they're
watching their production stock go in someone's
fuel tank. Oil isn't evil, but this run-amok
economy that's basically led to Iraq being
turned into a foreign-owned refinery complex
is as antithetical to anything you could honestly call democracy as I can think of.
There does come a point when questions have
to be raised about industry and public practice,
and I think we're basically there. I very much
like the idea of biofuels, I think you could
have it so that people can make their own
fuel if they wanted to, under permit and so
forth, but become small independent producers
of their own biodiesel and ethanol, giving
people nee consumers some alternate methods
of getting to work sans reinforcing the runamok
petro-biz. I don't support killing people in
other countries so outfits like this can
drill oil wells. I'd rather walk, truth be
told, if those were the only two options, but
they're not. I also disagree with our military
being used under false pretenses to facilitate
this. I don't care how much profit there is in
oil, if profit is the only justification for
being in business, then we should all become
heroin dealers. We are, as a nation, oil junkies. Time to clean up.

[Thorn]

And what do you think Al Gore is all about?

[wadenelson1]

What's the breakeven price per barrel for extraction of oil from the tar sands?