Big Changes Coming To Alberta Tar Sands With . . . New "Green" Branding & Marketing Campaign

[hatrack]

The marketing video is at the linked article, if you feel like a little projectile vomiting to start your Thursday.

Alberta’s major oilsands producers want you to look at a barrel of bitumen and see a pool noodle. A leaked PR campaign from the oilsands giants shows the companies are eager to rebrand the carbon-intensive industry as a net-zero resource that effortlessly turns its emissions into everything from water toys to carbon fibre boats and microchips. Currently being tested in focus groups, the Oil Sands Pathway Alliance campaign focuses on transforming carbon into everyday products with the tagline “Energy. Beautifully Designed.” A pitch video, initially posted online for focus group participants to view, but which has now been taken down, was sent to The Narwhal by Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, shows what the campaign will prioritize.

EDIT

But the focus on promoting positive messages about the oilsands, as revealed in the leaked material, is only the latest in a series of public relations and marketing campaigns over the years by both industry and government. Many of the campaigns were aimed at countering criticism about environmental impacts of extracting heavy oil from Alberta’s oilsands, a region that holds the world’s third largest reserves of crude, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, and requires large amounts of energy and water in production. “I think this will be the fifth or sixth attempt to rebrand the oilsands,” Stewart said.

EDIT

The basic premise of the Pathways plan to achieve net-zero emissions is this: continue producing bitumen in the oilsands, but couple that production with carbon capture and utilization technologies in a bid to decrease the overall carbon pollution of the industry. This includes a carbon dioxide pipeline from the oilsands region to a sequestration hub approximately 440 kilometres away, near Cold Lake, Alta. In a video posted to the Pathways site, MEG Energy President and CEO Derek Evans said it will be the largest carbon capture, utilization and storage facility in the world, “in terms of breadth” and the amount of carbon dioxide it would capture.

The plan to remove emissions relies heavily on the development of new technologies to achieve its goals and the campaign is vague about the details of converting carbon to pool noodles. “This suggests that we can somehow separate the bad stuff — carbon — from the good stuff — oil as energy,” Shane Gunster, an associate professor in the school of communication at Simon Fraser University, told The Narwhal. “And then that bad stuff we can, with technology, magically turn it into the good stuff that we want.”

EDIT

https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-oilsands-pr-campaign-carbon/

[captain queeg]

1. "Developing new technologies" reminds me of the Hanford cleanup

Spending billions on “glassification”. That has never worked and the spending keeps going.

[2naSalit]

2. +1

[mountain grammy]

3. My son is an operator at a refinery

Says the tar sands crude is the nastiest most corrosive stuff he’s ever seen. A little projectile vomiting indeed