Chevron is involved in two separate projects in the tar sands, the Athabasca Oil Sands Project (AOSP) and the Ells River Project. Chevron holds a 20% interest in the AOSP, a mining development 60% owned and operated by Royal Dutch Shell.

In Canada, the toxic burden on communities near the tar sands is already enormous. In addition to direct human exposure, oil contamination in the local watershed has led to arsenic in moose meat – a dietary staple for First Nations peoples – up to 33 times acceptable levels. Drinking water has also been contaminated.

With its considerable investments in expanding tar sands production and refining capacity, Chevron is placing a major bet on a fuel source that is dirtier to mine, process, and refine. Its extraction releases many times more greenhouse gas than conventional crude oil. The energy intensive process used to produce synthetic crude oil from tar sands generates three to five times more global warming pollution than does conventional oil production. Mining projects such as the AOSP require four tons of earth and as many as five barrels of water per just one barrel of oil, most of which ends up in vast toxic lakes.

More information on Chevron in Canada can be found in the Alternative Annual Report