Coming as it does in the final few months (or days?) of the UPA government in India, the proposal to buy in to the Canadian tar sands project smacks of deceit and turpitude. The reasons behind the statement are likely many and strategic. Perhaps state-owned ONGC does not wish to be pressured by the Ministry in to bidding for costly, if not low-probability deep-water blocks currently on offer at home. Perhaps ‘domestic’ American investors chose to invest in tar-sands through a proxy from a developing nation in the hope doing so would side-step the environmental opposition at home. But, most likely, it is India trying to raise its projected baseline emissions before participating in carbon trading (and in the process finding a temporary safe-haven for ’slimy’ money made from the Indian stock market to be traded for dollars when GEF buys out ONGC’s stake in future)?

Then again, it could be an obvious lie meant to convey an opportunity at home!

“Over the next five years, investment in the Alberta tar sands is expected to exceed $75 billion; oil production is set to increase by 160 percent by 2015. Alberta’s 59 tar sands sites now form the single largest industrial zone in the world. If it is fully developed, the result could be up to 54,000 square miles of man-made wasteland.

Digging up the tar sands is a dirty, wasteful business. Yet in their desperate scramble to cash in, the provincial government and the oil companies have downplayed the environmental risks. The boom is a major reason Canada will likely miss its carbon targets under the Kyoto Protocol. Converting tar sand into gasoline emits up to three times the greenhouse gases as drilling and refining conventional oil.

The extraction process consumes roughly twice the energy of producing conventional oil (in total, enough energy to heat a tenth of Canadian homes). And there are growing questions about the mines, which have transformed once-sleepy northern Alberta into an industrial frontier, and their health effects on wildlife and people.”