Wetlands are only a small portion of terrestrial land area, perhaps 4-9%. But in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region a little over half (54%) are fens, bogs, swamps, marshes, and shallow water areas. Wetlands, in other words.

Wetlands are unusually bio-diverse. They also sequester 20% of the world’s carbon.

The Athabasca Oil Sands are one of the largest, if not the largest, deposits of crude oil on the planet. Three million barrels per day are produced and mostly exported. Canada supplies the bulk of the oil our country imports. The USA consumes about twenty million barrels daily. The largest oil tankers in the world (ULCC, ultra large crude carrier) can carry about two million barrels.

There are 142,000 square kilometers of Oil Sands, mostly in Alberta. That’s about 54,000 square miles or roughly the size of North Carolina. The current mining footprint is under 1500 square kilometers (less than 600 square miles). That’s what they call the oil recovery—mining. Of course it takes a lot of people and infrastructure to support a large-scale mining operation and those impacts aren’t as easy to measure.

The way we live demands a lot of energy. Most of that energy comes from long-buried fossil carbon. And despite our recent enthusiasm for renewable sources we will still require hydrocarbon fuels and other petroleum products in very large quantities. That demand will continue to grow, especially in developing nations, and we will have to “mine” oil somewhere.

Where’s the best place?