Canadian oil sands key after '09

[lovuian]

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=220257


Canada holds almost 60 percent of the investable oil reserves in the world today, CIBC said Friday.

The Toronto bank also said by the end of the decade Canadian oil sands production will be the planet's single largest source of new supply.

With the Middle East and even Russia increasingly off-limits, we estimate that the oil sands and Canada's other deposits represent 56 percent of the world's investable reserves, said Jeff Rubin, chief strategist and economist at CIBC World Markets.

The CIBC report notes that despite soaring crude prices, conventional oil

capacity dropped in 2005 for the first time in history and will continue to

decline for the foreseeable future. It also notes that all of the projected
more...
It supports the Peak Oil theory I think

[Lautremont]

1. Too bad it takes an enormous amount of water and energy to

extract that oil from the oil sands. Rivers are drying up already.

It's going to get weird up here, I think.

[bananas]

2. There is plenty of fresh water as the arctic ice melts. nt

[Wonk]

3. I've even heard of proposals for a dedicated nuclear facility to power

the oil extraction process.

http://web.mit.edu/canes/publications/abstracts/nes/mit-nes-005.html

(snip)

The energy from the nuclear reactor would replace the need for energy supplied by natural gas, which is currently burned at these facilities.

http://www.google.com/search?q=canada+oil+sands+nuclear

[JohnyCanuck]

4. Oilsands threatening water reserves

The World Wildlife Fund Canada's report on water resources also warns that even a small amount of global warming could have a dire impact on flows in bodies such as the Great Lakes and Athabasca River.

The study says that levels in the Great Lakes could decrease by as much as 1.18 metres, and minimum flows in the northwestern Athabasca River could see a reduction of 10 per cent in the coming decades.

SNIP

The study warns that although Canada has extensive water resources, even a moderate amount of climate change will impact water flows in the Great Lakes and the Athabasca River enough to reduce hydro-electricity production in Ontario and oil sands development in Alberta.

"It looks like we've got a lot of (water) but we've been using it a lot, we've been polluting it and now what our study shows is that it's literally evaporating away as the world gets warmer," Julia Langer, a spokeswoman for the environmental group, told CTV's Canada AM.

http://news.sympatico.msn.ctv.ca/TopStories/ContentPosting.aspx?newsitemid=CTVNews%2f20061113%2fwwf_study_061113&feedname=CTV-TOPSTORIES_V2&showbyline=True

[JohnyCanuck]

7. "....the world is not like Spindletop in the Southeast of Texas anymore,

You can not just sink a drillpipe and get a gusher anymore.

Above remark is a quote from an article "Does the Peak Oil "Myth" Just Fall Down? -- Our Response to CERA" posted on www.theoildrum.com. This article was a response to a recent report by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA)that fears by some scientists and oil industry analysts of world oil production peaking within the near term, i.e. the next 5 to 15 years, are unfounded or greatly exagerated and can therefore safely be discounted.

Does the Peak Oil "Myth" Just Fall Down? -- Our Response to CERA
Posted by Dave Cohen

SNIP

Unfortunately, our analysis reveals the same worrisome pattern over and over again for substitutes. The three principal problems with substitutes are listed below.

1. Scalability by volume —new liquid fuel resources can generally only provide a small percentage of the total volumes of liquid fuels supplied by conventional oil. For example, a National Academy of Sciences report came to the following conclusion.

The real risk from all these planned ethanol plants is that they'll use up vast quantities of corn. America's entire corn and soy crop could supply fuel volumes equal to just 12% of gasoline demand and 6% of diesel demand, notes a University of Minnesota ecology professor, David Tilman, an author of the July 25 Proceedings article.

2. Scalability in time —even where there is a vast resource, liquid production flows from substitutes are slow to ramp up. As a result, in the case of exponentially declining oil production not replaced by new conventional oil sources, substitutes will not make up shortfalls incurred in the short-term. To make matters worse, similar remarks apply to production of new conventional oil eg. recovering stranded oil by means of CO2 injection enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

3. Low Energy Returns —this refers to energy returned by a production process for a fuel divided by the energy required to produce the fuel —standardly abbreviated as the EROEI. Both substitutes and, increasingly, new conventional oil production, have lower EROEIs tending toward the limit = 1. The closer one gets to the limit, the smaller the marginal returns. The EROEI term need not be confined to fossil fuel energy inputs but may include all of the economic costs associated with developing an energy fuel resource, depending on where the boundaries for the calculation are set. The general idea here is that the world is not like Spindletop in the Southeast of Texas anymore. You can not just sink a drillpipe and get a gusher anymore. The so-called "low hanging" fruit is gone and what is left is energy-intensive to develop & produce.

In an example of points #1 & #2 above, CERA believes that "GTL and CTL collectively may well represent 6 percent of global productive capacity by 2030", an unimpressive fraction of liquids production as estimated for that time period. Obviously, in the shorter term within the next decade, the percentage of gas-to-liquids or coal-to-liquids that will substitute for conventional oil will be negligible. Similar remarks apply to oil shales. If you believe, as we do, that the peak of production will come sooner rather than later, there is genuine cause for deep concern.

CERA explicitly acknowledges the scalability problems as the timescale of Figure 1 indicates. Despite their belief that the economics of unconventional substitutes is favorable, however, CERA does not seem to take net energy returns into account. There are already problems with the production of the oil sands in Canada, our most successful substitute so far. Capital expenditure costs are soaring to support new incremental production measured in increments of 100/kbd, thus making it harder to attract capital investments. Total production from the sands may be in the 2 to 3/mbd range by 2015, although estimates vary given the ongoing environment, logistic and net energy concerns there.

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/15/83857/186

[rman]

5. By 2015 Canadian oil production may reach 4 million barrels per day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athabasca_Oil_Sands

About 5% of current daily global demand.

[MadHound]

6. Another reason to switch it all over to biodiesel, using algae as a feedstock

Extracting that oil out of the sand is going to be an expensive, polluting, and energy intensive business. Rather, than laying waste to the Canadian wilderness, let us start switching over to biodiesel derived from algae. Thus we could supply all of our transportation fuel domestically, and wouldn't have to pollute some of this world's last semi-pristine landscape.

[Gman]

8. How good is Canada's army?

do you think they would fight back very hard?

[TangoCharlie]

10. Canadian Army will not put up much resistance ...

... as long as we respect and avoid damage to the Canadian holy places: Breweries and Hockey Arenas. If we attack those, the uprising will be enormous, even in Quebec.

When the big oil companies sponsor re-runs of "Canadian Bacon" on TV, that's the sign we're being prepped.

:)

[Altean Wanderer]

9. Yes, very supportive of peak oil 'theory'

And it well illustrates the important and vital difference between 'reserves' in the ground and the possible rate of production. The United States alone now uses about 22 million barrels of oil per day, the world about 84 million barrels a day. World demand is projected to increase to around 100 million barrels per day over the next decade. So even if Canada can ramp up its production of liquid fuels from their tar sands (and this goes for US oil shale as well), the resultant 5 or so million barrels a day is still but a fraction of US and world demand. No matter what, we must wean ourselves off our oil addiction.

[applegrove]

11. Canada already getting ready to buld nuclear reactors in Alberta

to get at the oil. Dion promises that Western Universities will get the funding to study what needs to be done to create cheap energy to cook the tar sands. What happens with the nuclear waste..I guess...is another generations problem.