BP's tragic Deepwater Horizon oil well rupture in the Gulf of Mexico points out a cruel irony -- that Canada's so-called "dirty oil" from the Athabasca Sands is now looking pretty good compared to oil from offshore drilling.

For the past 10 years, green-leaning politicians and policy gurus have talked about the "ecological carnage of the tar sands" and targeted them as the "worst project in the world." Al Gore likened the sands to the last vein the junkie finds in his big toe. Waterloo academic Thomas Homer-Dixon recently bemoaned that "The rapacious exploitation of Canada's tar sands has distorted our economy, corrupted our politics, ruined our environment, and turned us, collectively, into a rogue nation of carbon polluters." Even Toronto peak oil pop star Jeff Rubin has sneered, "You know you are at the bottom of the ninth when you have to schlep a tonne of sand to get a barrel of oil."

Anybody who didn't believe their tar-sands-are-evil-and-stupid mantra was clearly guilty of thought crime.

All this criticism is becoming increasingly moot now the oilsands and heavy oil of Alberta and Saskatchewan are proving themselves to be one of the world's most stable and productive petroleum sources. It's a resource that has turned Canada overnight into the world's major new petro power.

For most people, the Athabasca Sands conjure up the image of a large industrial site with monster trucks delivering oil sand to giant washing machines that belch steam and CO2 into the atmosphere and spew hot waste water into greasy tailing ponds that snare unwary ducks. But that picture is starting to change, since almost 90 per cent of the bitumen is underground and we can't get the energy out by surface mining.

The key to tapping into this underground treasure house is a Canadian invention by the awkward name of Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage, or SAGD, first developed by Calgary chemist Roger Butler in the 1980s.

It works because of horizontal drilling, also a major new oilfield technology that uses GPS and gyroscopic drilling. Operators in front of TV monitors send two parallel wells a few hundred metres down to the rich bitumen deposits, then steer the bits until they are horizontal, then drill and lay perforated pipe about five metres apart for about one kilometre in length. They then inject hot steam at pressure into the upper well and, after a period of several months of pressure cooking, pump oil and water out of the bottom well, recycling the water back into steam.

(Learn more about SAGD, and look at videos and animations on my Web Support site:www.alastairsweeny.com/blackbonanza)

There are some major strategic advantages to underground SAGD:

- Supply security: Early estimates said the oilsands hold about 180 billion barrels of crude, but the true amount is much larger. I believe that the 90 per cent of the sands that are deep underground hold at least one trillion barrels accessible using SAGD, which gives Canada more crude than the entire Middle East. Some pundits are estimating that crude will reach roughly $200 a barrel in five years. Increased Athabasca supply will help North America moderate future price swings.

- Managing risk: There is little risk of spillage or contamination of ground water with SAGD. In the early days, there were a few blowouts caused by too much pressure. Texaco had a steam geyser at a Fort McMurray pilot plant that blew like Old Faithful at Yellowstone Park. You can also manage SAGD risks far more easily than ocean drilling or even oilsands mining. The failure or sabotage of a tailings pond and contamination of the Athabasca and Mackenzie watersheds is still not beyond the realm of possibility.

- Minimal site damage: SAGD well sites are usually modular and built on gravel pads. When each deposit plays out, the whole operation, including the gravel, is moved to a different location. The boreal forest can reestablish itself in a generation or two.

- Low exploration costs: The sands have been pretty fully mapped.

- Lower emissions: Early SAGD sites used huge amounts of natural gas to generate steam. Newer sites are more self-contained and self-powering. Some recycle all of their water for steam, or add solvents or controlled burns to get out the oil. Some even produce fully upgraded light synthetic crude oil (SCO) on site.

- New "clean coal" microrefineries will be able to trap emissions and turn CO2 into gasoline for about 24 cents a gallon.

- To put things into perspective, the Deepwater Horizon cleanup will cost at least a billion dollars (possibly many times that): For $1 billion, you can develop a clean SAGD well facility in the Athabasca that can deliver a quarter million barrels a day.

Over the next year or two a new set of Canadian pipelines will be delivering 1.1 million barrels a day of Athabasca crude to thirsty refineries in President Barack Obama's home state of Illinois and as far as Texas, to Gulf refineries currently suffering from low supplies.

Will this bonanza last? The only threat to the Athabasca party comes from advancing solar technology. Current silicon cells are only 30-per-cent efficient at best, but new thin-film nanosolar technology will be up to 85-per-cent efficient and able to compete with gasoline in 10 to 15 years, eventually powering most of our short-haul cars and delivery vehicles.

In the meantime, with the fabulous Athabasca Sands, we are blessed with a huge resource that will let us survive the growing threat of peak oil and help us reach a more sustainable energy future.

Alastair Sweeny is an Ottawa-based writer and Web publisher, and author of Black Bonanza: Canada's oilsands and the Race to Secure North America's Energy Future. (Wiley Canada, 2010). His 'business biography' of the BlackBerrry, BlackBerry Planet, was published by Wiley in 2009.