BP shatters green reputation

Canada claims it has 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil in Alberta. Photo / Reuters

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move "Beyond Petroleum" by finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of abandoning its "green sheen" with a massive plan to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness using methods environmentalists say are part of the "biggest global warming crime" in history.

The multinational oil and gas producer, which last year made a profit of £11 billion ($28.6 billion), is facing a head-on confrontation with the green lobby in the pristine forests of North America after Greenpeace pledged to campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called "oil sands" that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the world's second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Producing crude oil from the tar sands - a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay - found beneath more than 139,859 sq km of prime forest in northern Alberta, an area the size of England and Wales combined, generates up to four times more carbon dioxide than conventional drilling.

The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of Britain's entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according to environmentalist activists.

The oil rush is also scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of tonnes of plant life and topsoil are scooped away in vast open-pit mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers.

Up to five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas.

The industry, which now includes all the major oil multinationals, including the Anglo-Dutch Shell and American combine Exxon-Mobil, boasts it takes two tonnes of the raw sands to produce a single barrel of oil.

BP insists it will use a less damaging extraction method, but it accepts that its investment will increase its carbon footprint.

Mike Hudema, the climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace in Canada, said: "BP has done a very good job in recent years of promoting its green objectives.

"By jumping into tar sands extraction it is taking part in the biggest global warming crime ever seen and BP's green sheen is gone.

"It takes about 29kg of CO2 to produce a barrel of oil conventionally. That figure can be as much 125kg for tar sands oil.

"For BP to be involved in this trade not only flies in the face of their rhetoric but in the era of climate change it should not be being developed at all.