BP were targeted by advocacy group ‘People and Planet’ at the Earth and Environment careers fair last Wednesday, in protest of their work extracting Tar Sands in the Alberta Region of Canada. The group of students stood in front of the BP stall, with a banner reading ‘Best Polluters’ to highlight to students their concerns with the corporation. ‘People and Planet’ member Emma Friend said of the protest ‘We wanted to highlight the effects the tar sands are having on the immediate Canadian environment, the indigenous people who live there and its contribution to climate change generally’.

The oil is contained in bitumen, requiring the injection of steam and natural gas for its extraction, in an energy intensive process called Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD). This process has been criticised for releasing more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production, using up large resources of natural gas, as well as deforestation, drawing on local aquifers and the pollution of groundwater. Alberta, in Western Canada, is an area the size of England, inhabited by various Aboriginal communities, who feel their land is being exploited by the government for natural resources. Extracting the oil marks continued investment and use of fossil fuels rather than renewable energies, hindering attempts to keep a global temperature rise below 2°C.

We were unable to get a comment from BP or the Earth and Environment department on this topic, however on its website BP reports the Alberta tar sands as the world’s third largest proven oil reserve, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela; a crucial source to meeting the world’s energy needs and contributing to energy security. It offers a response to the environmental and social concerns, stating that the SAGD processes ‘create a smaller physical footprint [than open cast mining] and do not involve tailings ponds’ and that it ‘ is supportive of the work the Alberta government is doing in partnership with the concerned Aboriginal groups’.

Nevertheless, this is not the first time BP has been mired in controversy: the 2010 Deep Horizon oil spill leaked 200 million gallons of oil and 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico, and in 2007 they were fined $373 million by the US Department of Justice for committing fraud and environmental crimes. BP has also partnered with Russian oil company Rosneft in proposals for offshore drilling sites in the fragile ecosystem of the Arctic, where oil reserves lie beneath the diminishing ice cover.

The protest comes amid debates of whether the university should let corporations with a history of ethical concerns on campus. A BP employee at the fair thought the group were assuming the science students had ‘no moral compass’, when they were in fact concerned with ‘looking for good causes’, whilst Emma Friend commented ‘that students have a right to create discussion about the ethics of companies and that the careers fair was an appropriate place to do this.’

Alexandra Mitchell