The new dirty energy

It’s big, it’s growing – and it’s bad for the environment. Inside the other alternative-energy movement.

For those who dream that high oil prices will help drive America toward a brave new world of clean energy, the MacKay River project in Alberta, Canada, offers a glimpse of the future.
The complex is a showpiece of cutting-edge engineering, wresting energy from beneath a swath of boreal forest. Under an unobtrusive spread of buildings, holes drilled at oblique angles free unprocessed fuel from the earth with jets of steam.Thanks to government and private investment, the complex is providing more energy every year, and by 2020, Alberta as a whole is predicted to generate enough to replace a quarter of the United States’ current daily oil usage. And as oil prices rise, projects like MacKay River become more and more cost-effective – and more popular.

The only problem: The thick, tarry petroleum that the Alberta project pulls from beneath that forest is far dirtier than oil.

Alternative energy wasn’t supposed to look like this. For years, leading environmental thinkers have argued that high fossil fuel prices are good for the planet, driving investors and customers toward biofuels, solar power and a host of new energy sources that will quickly become cost-effective.

But as oil prices stay high, the real beneficiary often turns out to be a very different alternative-energy industry, one focused on dirty fuel sources such as oil sands, oil shale and coal. Environmentally speaking, the oil-sand plants of Alberta are no better than petroleum drilling and in some ways decidedly worse. In North America, in terms of energy output, this “unconventional oil” sector already dwarfs clean and renewable-energy technologies and is poised to grow even faster in the next decade.

“To assume that high energy prices mean we’ll switch to wind or solar or other renewables is simply unrealistic,” says Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. “It only means that if we make that a concerted policy.”

Dallas News