Erikka Askeland: BP dipping its corporate toes in the dingy depths of tar sands oil

IF YOU think it's miserable and wintry here, you should try Fort McMurray in northern Alberta, Canada. The hamlet is the cosmopolitan, in relative terms, centre of the Athabasca tar sands fields, next door to the invitingly-named Cold Lake, another tar sands area.

When the first frostbitten European explorers arrived in the typically treeless Alpine tundra of the region, they noticed the indigenous Cree tribesmen used oil pooled on the ground's surface to waterproof the bottoms of their canoes. Yet moving on 320 odd years, that same tribe is complaining that efforts to remove the oil from those very same tar sands are causing unusually high levels of cancer in the population.

Earlier this year, investors attending meetings for the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh probably heard these claims for the first time, when Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, a Dene woman from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations used the AGM as a forum to voice her anger over RBS's investment in the region. Environmentalists are also enraged by tar sands extraction, with some reports suggesting a barrel of oil extracted from the sands emits between 5 and 15 per cent more greenhouse gases than that from other sources.

So why has BP, fresh from one of the world's biggest environmental disasters, now decided to step into this dirty imbroglio? Surely the firm has had enough bad PR?

BP is investing an initial $2.5 billion in the Sunrise oil sands project, a joint venture with Canadian/Hong Kong oil firm Husky. It is the oil and gas giant's first new commitment since the Deepwater Horizon disaster last April - and the first since BP withdrew its application for the Greenland government's latest licensing round to explore for oil in "Iceberg alley". It seems that Bob Dudley, BP's chief executive, thinks that tar sands extraction is the lesser evil than putting a drill in deep water offshore the pristine Arctic shores of Greenland.

But BP had initially held back when the tar sands were subject to a "black gold" rush in 2000. Back then, it reckoned the economics didn't stack up and it also took into its consideration that the getting of oil out of the ground was environmentally sensitive.

But not any more. In recent years, the tar sands has hit a lull, dampened by volatile oil prices and frozen capital markets. The thaw has now come to the frozen northern shrublands of Alberta.

Among oil sands developments due to start up in 2011, Shell aims to more than double output at its Athabasca Oil Sands Project.

Suncor expects first oil from a third phase of its Firebag joint venture, while Devon Energy aims to start up the second phase of its Jackfish development near the end of the year, again doubling output.

It also helps that Canada's environment minister, John Baird, is dead set on tar sands.Just days before he was about to fly to Cancun for UN climate talks, he sounded more like an industrial minister than an environmental one. "The stupidest thing you can do," he told legislators, "is to run against an industry that is providing employment for hundreds of thousands of Canadians, not just in Alberta but right across the country."

Unless global consumption of oil changes dramatically - and this is difficult to imagine how - oil companies will continue to go to greater extremes to recover it as easy oil reserves run dry.

This means going into political minefields like Nigeria where Western oil and gas crews are taken hostage by hostile, embattled locals on a regular basis. Or deeper water, so deep that a spill can take months to stop - releasing millions of barrels of oil into the oceans in the process.

Canadian tar sands has already been described as the next Saudi Arabia. The region is sparsely populated, the politicians are more than amenable and the environmental damage is easy to hide.

If I were Bob Dudley, responsible for securing BP's future, that's where I'd put my money too.

Dinosaurs unable to move with the times over women on boards

IT should come as no surprise that the Institute of Dinosaurs is against the use of gender quotas to raise the number of women on boards of UK companies. In its submission to the Department for Business's call for evidence about women on boards, it said no to quotas, because these are demeaning and would "undermine the credibility" of female directors.

Although these arguments may seem a little racy in the UK, in the US the debate over what they call "affirmative action" has been round the houses since 1972. Stemming from the civil rights movement, the move was initially a redress to Jim Crow laws and widely adopted by universities. The jury is still out as to whether affirmative action policies have actually done much of anything to promote the role of women and African Americans, although the US does have its first black president. But then the UK had the first woman prime minister. The debate goes on.