Ten hectares of the world’s forests are destroyed every minute, amounting to 4.9 million hectares a year. Between 1990 and 2005, 72.9 million hectares of forest vanished. Forests cover a total surface area of 3.69 billion hectares, or 30% of the Earth’s land mass.
These are the latest figures published by the FAO on 30 November 2011, which also reveal that the rate of net loss of forested land is speeding up, rising from 4.1 million hectares between 1990 and 2000 to 6.4 million hectares between 2000 and 2005.

The new frontier in energy is represented by oil shales, black sedimentary rock that is extremely rich in bitumen from its high content of organic substances. Bitumens can be natural or artificial. Natural bitumens are commonly-occurring in Trinidad, Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, Colorado and Canada.

The Athabasca Oil Sands (historically known as the Athabasca Tar Sands) are large deposits of bitumen located in north-eastern Alberta, Canada. Athabasca is the largest reservoir of crude bitumen in the world and the largest of the three major oil sands deposits in Alberta.
The Canadian oil reserves contain a total of around 1.7 billion barrels of bitumen, comparable to the size of the world’s total oil reserves.

In 2002, the Oil and Gas Journal (Oil and Gas Journal) included the tar sands in the country’s oil reserves, as oil can be produced from the bitumen extracted from the sands. Using tar sands was considered too expensive until a few years ago, but in light of today’s much higher crude prices, this option has been re-evaluated.

However, the advent of this new method of exploitation added greenhouse gas emissions arising from changes to the use of the land associated with the extraction of oil from the tar sands to those produced as a result of the extraction, refining, transport and use of fuel oils, with further consequences for climate change.

This degrades the air quality of the planet and shows up the abuse of the natural resources, land and forest regions where oil shales is found. In Canada, around 3,000 km2 of boreal forest (which accounts for one quarter of the world’s still intact forests) have been deforested, reclaimed or converted into opencast mines for the extraction of tar sands

Download image: Near Athabasca River, Alberta, Canada
Images COSMO-SkyMed © ASI, acquired on 30 October - 3 November 2011

<< back