OIL'S DIRTY FUTURE

[Kadie]

OIL'S DIRTY FUTURE

Canadian oil sands: Vast reserves second to Saudi Arabia will keep America moving, but at a steep environmental cost

Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, May 22, 2005



Fort McMurray, Alberta -- At the end of a long northern highway, surrounded by a flat horizon of spruce forest and muskeg swamp, lies the energy future of the United States: the largest known petroleum deposit in the world outside Saudi Arabia.

This future isn't a pretty sight. Just north of the oil boomtown of Fort McMurray, the forest suddenly falls away into a series of enormous strip mines as deep as 250 feet and covering many square miles each. From the rim, 60-foot-tall shovel loaders look like toys as they claw ton after ton of tar-like sands from the ground.

Nearby, refineries burn natural gas to steam-cook the sands, separate the tarry residue and purify it intooil.

These oil sands are the world's most expensive, most polluting source of oil under production. Wringing four barrels of crude oil from the sands requires burning the equivalent of a fifth barrel. The mines and refineries release huge amounts of greenhouse gases -- the equivalent each day to more than a third of California's daily car emissions.

more...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/22/CANADA.TMP

[stopbush]

1. And America is sitting on 2 TRILLION barrels of shale oil,

which is similar to the Canadian sand reserves. Supposedly, these shale reserves will be producing 3Million barrels a day by 2020, but who knows what our energy needs will be by then.

[applegrove]

4. Shale sounds cleaner..you could just get a big size & press and

get it out that way. Let the US use the shale oil first.

[chlamor]

5. Shale Oil is not Oil it's Kerogen this means heaps of greenhouse gasses

There are huge reserves of 'non-conventional' oil in Canada, parts of the USA, Australia and South America. It takes the form of bitumen, shale oil and tar sands. The problem is, despite the huge quantity, it can only be exploited slowly. Take shale oil for instance. Instead of the oil (actually, it's not oil, it's kerogen, a pre-cursor to oil which can be refined into something we can use) being held in porous rock, it's tightly locked into the shale. It has to be strip mined, so first you must remove the overburden (the land above it) and put it somewhere. Then you can blast it or dig it out. Then you have to crush the shale, put it into a retort and heat it to over 500 degrees centigrade. This then releases the kerogen as a gas which can be distilled back to liquid kerogen. The kerogen can then be refined into oil and then into gasoline etc. For each barrel of oil, you must mine a ton of shale. After you have heated the shale up, it expands by 30% - 50%, and will no longer fit back into the hole from which it came. And the heating and refining releases heaps of greenhouse gases. We would need to mine and process about 250 million tonnes of shale each year for each one percent of oil that we tried to replace. This is not on, even discounting the moonscape it would make of the mine sites.

http://media.socialchange.net.au/people/les/oil.html

[applegrove]

6. sorry - I was being sardonic. Is there an icon for sardonic? n/t

[hatrack]

7. Full-scale kerogen extraction needs tens of millions of acre-feet of water

Since most of the "oil shale" is located in eastern Utah and western Colorado, full extraction isn't very bloody likely, even assuming that the thermodynamics and economics were possible.

[amerikat]

2. Great article

There are countless options with energy. I am currently leaning to vegtable oil in the near term and renewables after that.

[kaygore]

3. Think maybe we could try conservation??!!

I had my car stolen, but even before that occurred, I was limiting its use to one day a week. The rest of the time I did and now must walk, ride a bike, or take public transportation. What is more, I have been house sitting in Portland, Oregon, so the weather tends to be rainy.

We all need to make this commitment (not to have your car stolen--and if you live in Portland, I urge you to take precautions!), but to conserve.

Wear some extra clothes if it is cold and strip if it is hot (let's give the "Christians" something to talk about).

It has to begin with each of us because it sure isn't going to begin at the top.