The tar sands - biggest industrial development in the world.
There's a massive environmental disaster unfolding in one of the most delicate ecosystems in the world, and BP are responsible.
Sound familiar? You'd be forgiven for thinking of the oil slick gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. But actually, out of the glare of the media spotlight, BP is working on producing another environmental disaster zone. It's just that this time, as far as the company is concerned, nothing's gone wrong. It's just business as usual.
These days ‘business as usual' for BP means investing in the Athabascan tar sands, where deposits of thick, sticky bitumen lie beneath the forest wilderness of Alberta, Canada.
The company is planning to invest billions in order to get at this pot of low-grade oil, which provides Canada with the second-largest oil reserves on the planet after Saudi Arabia.
While it might feel like this is all happening a long way away, we in Europe have two direct and troubling links to the tar sands.
First up, tar sands production has implications for the future safety of our climate because of the rocketing greenhouse gas emissions coming from what has become teh biggest industrial development on the planet. But secondly there's a much more direct link, demonstrated in a new Greenpeace report which shows that tar sands oil is making its way into European fuel tanks.
Up until now, what has helped BP keep the issue relatively quiet in this country is the idea that tar sands is a problem mainly for Canada, which suffers the direct environmental damage, and for the US, which imports most of the tar sands oil. But now our investigation shows that we're implicated - that we're using tar sands oil in the EU.
Companies like BP view the tar sands as an exciting opportunity to make massive profits feeding a continued demand for oil. But the opportunity comes at a cost. Extracting the bitumen mean either opencast mining away the boreal forest and hundreds of metres of topsoil, or cutting swathes through the forest to install pipeline systems to pump burning gas beneath the ground and melt the oil out.
That's a local environmental catastrophe, but there are also global implications, because tar sands production has on average three times the carbon emissions of normal oil production. It's clearly a terrible idea.
Yet BP seem to think that pursuing ever-more marginal sources of oil - deeper and deeper wells, massively invasive and inefficient production methods like tar sands - is the way forward. No wonder there's been some controversy around tar sands. At BP's AGM in London earlier this month 15% of their shareholders didn't support the company over plans for tar sands investment - an unprecedented shareholder revolt.
Finding out that we're using tar sands oil in Europe demonstrates an immediate problem. But could it also be an opportunity? Knowing that we're importing oil from the tar sands could give the EU some leverage in controlling the environmental damage caused by the tar sands. If the EU were to set a tough standard on limiting the greenhouse gas emissions from imported fuel, this could rule out tar sands imports altogether, and drive change in the oil industry.
Maybe changing the way the oil industry operates to minimise environmental damage is a pretty timely goal?
