For anyone who may be interested, here is a nice photography collection taken recently by a journalist. LINK . It's rather negatively-presented (no surprise there) but I'd say it's fairly accurate in most regards, although I do believe he has deliberately over-emphasized the tailings ponds.

All the pictures are of just one or two large operating plants. There are currently about 56 new projects either underway or in approval for construction, with a total capital investment of $123 BILLION - that's an average of $2.2bn dollars expenditure per project.

Well, someone needs to provide the fuel so that you can drive your Suburban half a mile to Timmies...

Wow.

Thanks for the link. Very informative... I've learnt a lot from it.

That was worth a click...

It was. Very informative.

+1

Of course it's obvious that these photos are faked by radical foreign funded environmental lobby groups masquerading as charities.

If you look closely at picture 51 you'll see the shadow on that chap's nose is going the wrong way.

Pshht.

It looks absolutely charming.

Really impressed that flying a Cessna 172 allows you to get street level views and shots from inside a community centre, that's some pilot. For somewhere that wouldn't allow you access, some of those shots are impossible to get without access, so lying through your teeth from the get go, not a way to engender trust and belief in your audience.

Negative bias is one thing, but just plain being completely wrong is bad bad journalism. Just picture 16 alone (the Cat 797 dump trucks) is so full of errors it's not funny. They don't have that much of a capacity and are nowhere near the largest in the world, just the largest Caterpillar produce. And I wish it was the only image with problems, but it's not.

Seriously, if you're going to try and make something negative, you carry more weight if the facts are just that, facts. Not made up tripe for sensationalism. It's not like you need to make stuff up to portray the oil sands negatively, it pretty much writes itself.

Absolutely. It's clear that the yellow liberal media have a hard on to prove that the oil sands aren't a boon to mankind in general and anything but a brilliant idea spawned by Steven Harper to take over the United States.

Enough I say. Some sanity please.

<extra photos supplied by the Conservative Party of Canada>

Which one Novo? 51 is a memorial.

I just spent an hour reading through all that, and the link to the new drilling methods that are being used too. Thanks for the link Jings

Very interesting indeed.

I can see how the guy tried to be objective, but there was an underlying negative thread going on there. Also if you carried on to the second story where there were no big nasty ponds of coloured water involved, he started down the danger route (but every heavy industry is dangerous).

Anyway, I feel I have learned something new today

You have to find the right Area on 51.

Probably because I live here, but I was already aware of what goes on in Fort Mac in some detail.

I think the more relevant point isn't what the environmental impact is, but the fact that they keep trying to reduce the environmental impact and failing. For example the nuclear reactor in Peace River was cancelled, that would have reduced the amount of natural gas consumed in Fort Mac but the price of gas now is so low that no-one cares - except environmentalists.

Also all the "carbon sequestration" things the Province keeps pumping money into never seem to get results, it's all public relations.