This is what politicians mean when they talk about 'clean oil' from Newfoundland's offshore
CBC
Newfoundland and Labrador is sitting on billions of dollars in potential oil revenue.
It's also, subsequently, generating billions of kilograms of greenhouse gasses.
Despite that, as a proposal for the province's newest offshore project, Bay du Nord, awaits final approval from Ottawa, politicians repeatedly espouse the environmental virtues of local crude.
The Bay du Nord oil, buried under more than a kilometre of seawater in an area of the Atlantic known as the Flemish Pass, is allegedly "the cleanest in the world," as Liberal MP Ken MacDonald told reporters late last month.
He's not the only one framing the crude as a good thing for the climate, a marketable replacement for so-called dirtier oils around the world. The provincial government, too, took a hard line on its petroleum resources last year, calling its offshore deposits "low-carbon" over a dozen times in a 35-page oil and gas industry report.
"It is not in Canada's or the world's best interest to limit low-carbon oil production from Canada and encourage high-carbon oil development in other parts of the world to meet the energy demand," the report argues.
But just how clean can oil get?
"When they say the cleanest oil in the country or the greenest oil in the country, well, what they're actually saying is that the production of oil is going to produce less greenhouse gas emissions," says Jean Phillipe Sapinsky, an assistant professor at the University of Moncton and researcher with the Corporate Mapping Project, which follows the fossil fuel industry in Canada.
"It's not the production of oil that's damaging, it's when we burn the oil. And the oil is extracted to be burned," Sapinsky added.
Extraction "includes things like flaring, venting methane into the air, fixing methane leaks," explains Paasha Mahdavi, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California.
Oil taken from Newfoundland's offshore is, technically, "a green comparison to, for example, the tar sands, which are very energy-intensive to produce and process."
But like Sapinsky, Mahdavi explains most greenhouse gasses in a barrel of oil don't come from the extraction process. The entire procedure, from taking it out of the ground to exporting it, only accounts for about 15 per cent of a barrel's total emissions.
"So you can have the absolute cleanest oil produced," Mahdavi said, "and you can still only absorb one-sixth of the emissions problem."
Oil off Newfoundland's shore is often considered a light, sweet crude, with a consistency anywhere from maple syrup to water, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.