Rejecting oil sands means pricier gas, U.S. warned

[CHIMO]

Source: THE CANADIAN PRESS

EDMONTON – Alberta is firing back at U.S. politicians who think that the province's massive oil sands projects create "dirty" energy products that should be avoided to protect the environment.

Energy Minister Mel Knight says American lawmakers will likely feel a backlash from consumers if they stop buying fuel from the oil sands and turn to more expensive energy sources, like offshore oil or alternative fuels.

Knight was reacting to news reports that presidential hopeful Barack Obama is now talking about curbing imports of "dirty" oil from various sources, including Canada's oil sands.



Read more: http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/449223

[papapi]

1. Mining of oil sands destroys tens of thousands of acres of....

pristine landscape in Canada. It's as bad as the destruction of the rainforest. Only money hungry corporations can support this kind of rape of our planet. It is capitalism in it's worst form.

[George1984]

10. First go to northern Alberta

Then compare it to the 'pristine' rain forests. It wasn't much before they destroyed it for the oil. I grew up in northern Alberta. Whether it is right or wrong makes no difference, it is coming out of the ground. Cut the oil off from there to the U.S, and we'll send it to China anyways and the U.S will pay $9 a gallon for fuel. The pipelines are already proposed to head to the west coast and the U.S government is crapping bricks.

I admire his call for clean energy, and agree with the strive for change, but without an alternative that is here now and producing energy for the citizens, it is a brave stance.

[BigDaddy44]

14. What?

It sounds more like a massive environmental cleanup project to me. Do you consider tar sands to be pristine landscape?

[CHIMO]

19. TravellingAlberta.com offers one-of-a-kind oil sands vacation packages

Diversion surfing: Catch a wave, Alberta-style, and join Big Oil in taking advantage of the nearly 92 billion gallons of water diverted from provincial rivers each year!
Animal sightings: Moose playing in tailings ponds, loons drenched in tar and ducks sinking in oil: it's not everywhere that you can see some of Canada's most prized wildlife in these unique settings. Hurry though! They're going fast!
Tailings sailing: Come enjoy the vast lakes of toxic water, so big they're visible to the naked eye from space! Chase that horizon, but be careful not to capsize!
Fun in the sun: Forget Cancun, Alberta is sizzling! Boasting more greenhouse gas emissions than Canada's three other most populous provinces combined, it's really heating up out here!
http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/recent/travellingalberta-com-offers-o

[Arctic Dave]

2. It won't cost more if we demand higher efficiency standards.

[Democrats_win]

3. Obama is making a mistake here. We are currently using that oil.

If politicians cut off that supply, then how will the demand be met?

Surely he isn't that stupid to leave Americans hanging without a supply of fuel.

Leaders need to make good decisions and those decisions should first fix the problem of high gas prices. The recent rise in oil prices may be speculators, but the TREND of higher oil prices will continue. It took 28 years to get here and it will take gentle wise leadership to get us back on track. A definite tight rope. Sudden moves like this will really hurt Americans.

[Buzz Clik]

6. It's a shell game, or like poking a drop a mercury.

You poke it here, it squeezes out over there. Obama knows this.

[recoveringdittohed]

4. Pipeline already in the works

I suspect a lot of Canadian oil will be sold here. Website for the pipeline refers to contracts for 495,000 barrels a day for 18 years.

http://www.transcanada.com/keystone/keystone_pipeline.html

[Buzz Clik]

5. Canada is currently mining the hell out of the oil/tar sands.

And, yes, it is really a filthy source of crude at every step in the process.

Do a little digging into who is receiving that dirty crap. Then check to see if they've been applying for waivers or redrafting of their discharge agreements with EPA. I won't name names *cough cough hack BP hack spew cough* or tell you where to look *wheeze spit Gary Indiana blah!*. Do your own research.

[pegleg]

9. And their economy is booming in Alberta. If we nix this deal then we deserve

what we get.

[Buzz Clik]

12. Right -- and what we'll get is what we already have: buying oil on the global market.

[ohio2007]

18. An oil refinery is being built in Soutrh Dakota because

http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/forecast/archive/The_U.S._Poised_to_hit_New_Oil_Gusher_080317.html

[hunter]

25. It's a kind of myopia...

Bakken formation oil is very difficult to extract. If not for all the easy-to-extract coal, oil and natural gas still supporting this economy, these sorts of projects would not be viable.

In effect it's the easy-to-extract fossil fuels that subsidize these much more difficult extraction processes.

If you measure things in terms of energy and human effort the situation is much clearer than if you reduce your measure to the single variable of dollars. Obviously it's possible in our society to make a dollar profit even with a process that is a drag upon the overall economy.

[Indenturedebtor]

7. It's a brave stance by Obama. I respect that and agree with him.

To those that disagree - why don't we dig for oil in your backyard and put the refinery in your basement.

Most of the fuel costs are from the speculators anyways. It's time we move on to algal biodiesel and stick it in hybrids. For longer distances you can take the new train ;)

[pegleg]

8. Canada is now our #1 importer of oil.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html

And you think the North American Union is just a conspiracy theory?

[hunter]

11. What kind of gas?

Basically they are using less expensive natural gas to make more expensive diesel and gasoline out of oily dirt.

Natural gas prices will inevitably rise and this will be revealed to be a most stupid kind of pyrimid scheme, a horribly inefficient, expensive, and environmentally destructive way of selling last year's energy at this year's prices.

If they really want to make it even worse, they will use nuclear power to extract the oil. If people in this civilization really are that stupid, we are doomed. In a thousand years high technology will be hitting your neigbor over the head with a rock so you can steal his food.

[Caradoc]

13. Mean and ungreen....

...there's always been something weird about Alberta, like the moment you move there your common sense and human compassion gets replaced with an infantile desire to show yourself to be a real hard ass.

Stephen Harper was born in Ontario but grew up in Alberta and it shows. Alberta is the promised land for political conservatives and represents its very worst characteristics. They absolutely hate 'the government' (any but their own, as they haven't had anything but conservative rule in literally decades) but oddly enough don't have the guts to opt out of universal healthcare. They moan incessently about the old Trudeau-era national energy policies (where the nation shared oil and gas revenues) as being a 'rip-off' yet somehow still managed to amass a huge multi-billion dollar heritage trust fund while every other province was running deficits.

Harper & Co. don't care about environmental filth...they care about joining the United States. If these free marketeers actually cared about 'national security', they would nationalize the energy sector toute suite and secure oil and gas production for the short-term resource it is. But then again, that's what hard ass Albertans scare their kids with at night...bedtime stories about the big bad liberals coming along and nationalizing 'their' oil and gas. Alberta is like the gormless family member who sponges and sponges off the rest of the family, only to win the lottery and then tell everyone to go screw themselves.

[JohnyCanuck]

15. The project's expected costs to our forests, water and air.

The Harm the Tar Sands Will Do
The project's expected costs to our forests, water and air.

By Dan Woynillowicz

SNIP

WATERS

The Athabasca River winds nearly 1,500 kilometres from its source at the Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park to Lake Athabasca in Wood Buffalo National Park. It is Alberta's longest river and one of North America's longest undammed rivers. It enters Lake Athabasca at the Peace-Athabasca Delta, the largest boreal delta in the world, a World Heritage Site, and one of the most important waterfowl nesting and staging areas in North America.

It also passes directly through the boreal forest being cleared and strip-mined, and serves as the primary source of water used to separate the bitumen from the mined tar sands. Water withdrawals for tar sands surface mining operations pose threats to both the sustainability of fish populations in the Athabasca River and to the sustainability of the Peace-Athabasca Delta, jeopardizing the subsistence and commercial fisheries of local aboriginals.

Tar sands mining operations withdraw two to 4.5 barrels of fresh water from the river for every barrel of oil they produce. Current operations are permitted to withdraw more than 349 million cubic metres of water per year, a volume equivalent to the amount required by a city of two million people. But unlike city effluent waters, which are treated and released back into the river, tar sands mining effluent becomes so contaminated that it must be impounded.

Vast reservoirs of waste

Both tar sands mining and in situ operations produce large volumes of waste as a result of their water use. For in situ operations, the primary waste stream, a result of treating salt water and the water that is pumped up with the bitumen, is disposed of in landfills or injected underground. Tar sands mining operations present a much more significant risk, because they produce large volumes of waste in the form of mine tailings (six barrels of tailings per barrel of bitumen extracted). These tailings, a slurry of water, sand, fine clay and residual bitumen, are stored in vast wastewater reservoirs.

The industry misleadingly refers to them as "tailings ponds," but collectively these pools of waste cover more than 50 square kilometres and are so extensive that they can be seen from space. One tailings pond at Syncrude's mining operation is held in check by the third-largest dam in the world. These tailings dumps pose an environmental threat resulting from the migration of pollutants through the groundwater system and the risk of leaks to the surrounding soil and surface water.

The high concentrations of pollutants such as naphthenic acids, which are found at concentrations 100 times greater than in the natural environment, are acutely toxic to aquatic life, yet the government has no water-quality regulations for these substances. Migratory birds fare slightly better: to prevent them from landing, propane cannon go off at random intervals and scarecrows stand guard on floating barrels. How this tailings waste, and its grave risks, might be dealt with in the long term remains unknown.

http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/09/20/TarSands/

[marias23]

16. Oil Sands Take One Barrel to Make Two/ Pollutes Terribly

The statistics about Taking One Barrel to Make Two to produce sand oil are in the full artical.

Unconventional Crude
Canada’s synthetic-fuels boom.
by Elizabeth Kolbert
November 12, 2007
Elizabeth Kolbert, A Reporter at Large, "Unconventional Crude," The New Yorker, November 12, 2007, p. 46

The most important resource in the town of Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta, is the Alberta tar sands. The tar sands begin near the border of Saskatchewan and extend north and west almost to British Columbia. All in all, they cover some fifty-seven thousand square miles, an area the size of Florida. They consist of quartzite, clay, water, and a hydrocarbon known as bitumen, which can be converted into a form of petroleum known as synthetic crude. It’s estimated that there’s enough bitumen in Alberta to yield 1.7 trillion barrels of synthetic crude. Assuming only ten per cent of this is recoverable, it still represents the second-largest oil reserve in the world, after Saudi Arabia’s. In Fort McMurray, what might be called the world’s first unconventional oil boom is under way. Since 2002, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Imperial Oil (which is primarily owned by ExxonMobil) have all received approval to construct major projects in the tar sands. Over the next five years, investment in the Fort McMurray area is expected to amount to over $75 billion. Thanks to what’s happening in the tar sands—output now tops $1 million barrels a day—Canada has become America’s No. 1 source of imported oil. By 2010, tar sands yield is expected to double, and by 2015 to triple. Depending on how you look at things, this is either a heartening prospect or a terrifying one. The company that’s been producing oil from the tar sands the longest is known as Suncor. The writer toured Suncor’s Millennium Mine, which opened in 2002, with Gloria Jackson and Darin Zandee. For every barrel of synthetic crude that Suncor eventually produces, forty-five hundred pounds of tar sands have to be dug up and separated. Describes the history of efforts to extract oil from the tar sands. Mentions Manley Natland. Describes Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD). A great deal of energy is required. It’s estimated that by 2012 tar-sands operations will consume two billion cubic feet of natural gas a day. There are several reasons that oil companies are rushing to develop the tar sands. If the price of oil remains above $90, then these and other unconventional forms of fuel can be developed at a profit. With unconventional oil extraction, however, the damage to the environment tends to be higher all around—more land gets disturbed, more pollutants are produced, and then there are the greenhouse gases. “All unconventional forms of oil are worse for greenhouse-gas emissions than petroleum,” said Alex Farrell, of the University of California at Berkeley. Farrell and Adam Brandt found that the shift to unconventional oil could add between fifty and four hundred gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere by 2100. There is a great deal of support in Washington for measures that would, in effect, subsidize high-carbon fuels. Mentions the Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act (C.T.L.). In the village of Fort Chipewyan, opposition to new tar-sands projects is steadily growing. Meanwhile, development in northern Alberta continues unabated.

[ohio2007]

17. Congress wants to do NOTHING so the status qou will fund OPEC.

dirty coal
dirty oil
dirty shale


dirty deals

[Jack_DeLeon]

20. OMFG is Obama trying to lose the election?

thats all we fucking need $5+ gas and the Republicans can point to this and say Obama is against getting Americans the oil they need.

[trof]

21. It ain't cheap. $36-$40 per barrel extraction cost.

Compared to an extraction cost of less than $1 per barrel for Saudi crude and about $6 for U.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athabasca_Tar_Sands#Economics

[BigDaddy44]

22. at $140 a barrel it sure is cheap

[Barrett808]

23. Please see: "Tar Sands: The Oil Junkie's Last Fix"

Tar Sands: The Oil Junkie's Last Fix
By Chris Nelder



Shallow oil sand deposits in open pit mining: yes, this was a boreal forest.


For this week's article, I collaborated with energy journalist Roel Mayer, a freelance writer on earth, energy and economy, based in Canada. Roel is a keen observer on energy, and the Canadian tar sands in particular, so he was a natural research partner for this short study on the state of oil production from tar sands.

He was also the one who coined "The Law of Receding Horizons." For those who missed my previous articles on receding horizons, it is a simple concept: as the cost of energy rises, the cost of everything else made with energy (like building materials) also rises. So an energy project which was expected to be profitable when energy costs were x amount higher than today, turns out to still be uneconomical when you get there.

And the tar sands of Alberta are shaping up to be the oil industry's poster child of this phenomenon. With oil well over $60 today, the low-grade sludge called kerogen that we recover from tar sand--actually more like a putty, at room temperature, which is why I refuse to use the whitewashing term "oil sands--should be highly profitable.

But paradoxically, the impending decline of global crude oil production, which is now coming clearly into view, has led to a mad rush to produce the tar sands. And this, in turn, has led to skyrocketing costs...such that now, the real "profit" in producing the tar sands seems to be in government tax breaks, not in actual profit on the resource itself.

In fact, the Canadian tar sands operations are facing a whole host of challenges, beyond economic--so much so, that one wonders why we try to harvest them at all.

(more)

http://canada.theoildrum.com/node/2915

[Lorien]

24. We just can't kill ourselves fast enough, can we? n/t