Alberta Tar Sands Are Not Oil
B. McPherson Hold onto your hats. Here Canadians thought the Tar Sands were Oil Sands in Alberta. Some people call the product bitumen. It’s the consistency of peanut butter so won’t flow nicely in the pipelines. It needs to be heated in cold climates and diluted with a witch’s brew of chemicals, including that old favourite – benzene. When the Enbridge Pipeline carrying diluted bitumen or dilbit ruptured in the Kalamazoo River two years ago, they made some effort to clean up the oil, only it wasn’t oil. You know the old saying “If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck and walks like a duck, it must be a duck.” In the fairy tale land of the US lawmakers, dilbit isn’t oil. It’s something else again. Why is this important? Oil companies are required to pay into an Oil Liability Trust Fund that has the money to clean up the inevitable spills that occur during the transportation of oil products. But if you are transporting dilbit or oil, not oil they don’t h...