Canadian bishop slams oil sands development

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – The rapid-fire development of Canada’s oil sands region has garnered a new critic — the Catholic bishop whose diocese extends over the world’s second-largest oil reserves .

Luc Bouchard, bishop of the diocese of St. Paul, which covers nearly 156,000 square km (60,000 square miles) of northeastern Alberta and includes the massive oil sands developments near Fort McMurray, said this week that “the integrity of creation in the Athabasca oil sands is clearly being sacrificed for economic gain”.


In a pastoral letter to the region’s 55,000 Catholics, the bishop wrote that the exploitation of the huge resource is environmentally unsound, challenging the “moral legitimacy of oil sands production”.

More than a million barrels of oil a day are produced from Alberta’s oil sands, where reserves of 173 billion barrels are second only to Saudi Arabia’s.

Production was expected to more than double by 2015, but falling oil prices and tightened credit have forced most of the region’s operators to set aside ambitious expansion plans until the economy recovers.

Reuters