Maybe we could recycle the tires on those vehicles for a couple more barrels ...

| _{The problem will solve itself.}
|  _{But not in a nice way.}

Chris

Thank you for an excellent pair of Key Posts! Of course they are not likely to do any good before the oil junkies have blown up that last toe vein and are just stabbing themselves senselessly looking for another place to fix.

Its time to do the heretofore unthinkable, and demand that no more internal combustion engines be sold new in North America, and go full tilt into Alan Drake's Electrification of Rail program. Its the only possibility that has a real chance of success while helping society transition to the inevitable, renewables as the only energy available.

The problem is that its going to require real sacrifice by every industry in the world, and every family in North America. We are going to have to ask the oil industry to change by shrinking by 70% by changing away from fuel refining and marketing to industries like marketing electricity from renewable energy. Its going to kick the value out of every vehicle in North America while many people still owe years of payments. Its going to add another huge area of worthless loans to a financial industry thats already imploding. And in order to stop the exponential growth overseas we are going to have to help the people of Africa and Asia leapfrog fossil fuel to renewables. Only prosperous people cut birthrates, and it will do no good unless we can help them stop what appears to be a drive off the cliff as world demand continues to grow as supply contracts.

Its not unthinkable-society has put entire industries out of business before-look at asbestos-and tried to slowly choke off others, such as tobacco or nuclear until they started expanding again as we looked for another toe vein.

But real patriots have acted against their personal economic interests before with the right inspiration and leadership.

I urge everyone to read the 50 page pdf history of the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines during the second world war (google Big Inch Oil Pipeline) and also remember the Marshall Plan, where the US aided Germany and Japan to rebuild into modern industrial countries after the horrors of WW II. The Oil business actually destroyed millions of dollars worth of pipelines to get the steel and valves to build the first transcontinental oil and products lines at less than its cost so the Allies had enough fuel to invade Europe. The industrial might of the US was used to rebuild the industries of Europe so that they could become our only real economic competitors because we realised that was the only way to stop the horrible wars that kept convulsing the world.

And its now our turn to step up to the plate, but we can't do it without actual leadership that transcends the normal boundries that are used to seperate the world's people. Global warming isn't a liberal or conservative issue. Peak cheap energy isn't a Republican or Democrat issue. And living on the same planet with billions of hopeless poor people that have a huge population growth transcends any label. But we have to get actual leaders on this, not demagogues that want to divide us so they can rule us,.
Bob Ebersole

Absolutely superb piece.

Every economist and every trader who sits in a clean little cubicle somewhere on the planet should visit the tar sands. Smell it up close and personal.

What are we doing? In God's name, what are we doing?

What in the world is going to be the true cost of this last little rabbit?

Would it be possible to use a passive filter to reclaim the toxic water, as in a solar distiller? Angled clear plastic or glass, some tubing, and whatever the sun supplies.

There is a discrepancy in your article and one thing you fail to mention as the key driver of the oil sands: profits. You say "all to eke out maybe a 10% profit," yet they are making billions and billions in profits, likely more as oil prices inevitably increase in coming years. If production is ever ramped up to 3-4 mbpd, they would be making staggering amounts of money at today's oil prices. And we must realize that these projects are not so much more ambitious than the extremely deepwater operations in the GOM, North Sea, etc.

You Tube Video About Boomtown Growth in Fort McMurray

Great article!

I don't know what deserves the title of the most destructive practice that man has come up with (so far) for extracting energy. Tar sands, or mountaintop removal (to get at coal).

In any event, mountaintop removal is much easier for average people to see and experience. Tar sands is far too remote for most people to experience, so to average people it is just another way to get oil.

Some great (I mean horrible) pictures of the ponds and mines;

http://www.oilsandswatch.org/album/mining/projector.php?slide=index

Great article!

The environmental impact of bitumen mining is incredible for a developed nation today. Esp one with generally left-leaning social policies. I guess greed tops everything in the final analysis. Not mentioned by the author is that the royalties are tiny, so its a case of public cost, private profits.

For chapter 3 more numbers would be interesting. The author says that the water input is 2 - 4 barrels of water to extract a barrel of "oil" (synoil output?). Also useful would be the ratio of waste water output to synoil produced. That would let us estimate what Alberta might look like in 5 - 10 years (a measure of sustainability).

The natural gas data discussion is critical, but the numbers don't add up on my envelope. I have not seen estimates that Canada will run out of nat gas in 9 years; that implication from EIA reserve numbers seems a bit alarmist. Still, this seems a weak link in the bitumen expansion plans. Canadian consumers want the gas; the US wants the gas; and the bitumen miners want the gas. They cannot all have it. Who will pay the most?

Or can we import "cheap" LNG to meet everyone's needs?

This is my first post to TOD. I have been reading for nearly a year. After viewing the photos on souperman2 post I felt compelled to add this.

Engineers and Their Codes of Ethics

American Society of Civil Engineers
The first cannon – “Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public and shall strive to comply with the principles of sustainable development in the performance of their professional duties.

Institution of Civil Engineers (UK)
The first principle - "Members of the ICE should always be aware of their overriding responsibility to the public good. A member’s obligations to the client can never override this, and members of the ICE should not enter undertakings which compromise this responsibility. The ‘public good’ encompasses care and respect for the environment, and for humanity’s cultural, historical and archaeological heritage, as well as the primary responsibility members have to protect the health and well being of present and future generations.”

Professional Engineers of Ontario
“A practitioner shall, regard the practitioner's duty to public welfare as paramount.”

As a question of morals and ethics; how can any Professional Engineer involve themselves in any undertaking with the obvious negative environmental and health hazards of the quantity and magnitude that will be the legacy of tar sands extraction and processing?

Chris and Roel. Thanks very much for this emotive piece.

What we have here is arguably the most environmentally destructive activity man has ever attempted, with a compliant government, insatiable demand and an endless supply of capital turning it into "a speeding car with a gas pedal and no brakes." It sucks down critical and rapidly diminishing amounts of both natural gas and water, paying neither for its consumption of natural capital nor its environmental destruction, to the utter detriment of its host. And all to eke out maybe a 10% profit, if it turns out that the books haven't been cooked, and if the taxation structure remains a flat-out giveaway.

All of that, just to produce enough oil to offset the declining conventional oil production in the rest of Canada. Maybe.

And that, my friends, is what I call the oil junkie's last fix. An act of sheer desperation to stave off just a little longer that inevitable day when we are forced to realize that the fossil fuel game is truly over. No more rabbits in the hat. Done.

This is one of the best Dooom passages I've ever read.

A couple of technical questions:

What's worse, depending on a host of factors, the total Energy Return On Investment (the energy profit, if you will) for tar sands production is typically only around 5% to 10%.

Is that eroei of 1.05 to 1.1?

and

But with the current circumstances of stranded and otherwise useless natural gas,

A little elaboration please..

Many years ago, one of our managers, went out to the sands, to see if there was anything there we could make a profit on. He brought back a sample of the waste water, as being a problem which we might solve. Our engineers and chemists gave up on it. Some weeks later I was doing some work on water soluble proteins, solubizing and precipitating, with bases and acids. A mention was made aboutchanging the charge on the surface as one result.
I thought back to the oilsands problem. I took a sample from the waste water drum which was still around, added a small amount of N5 sulphuric, and the solution cleared immediately with a clay like mass ending up at the bottom of the beaker. But my Boss was not interested anymore! No patent applied for, try it out.

Chris,

The water shortage will provide the needed impetus for the oil sands industry to find ways to use less water and to recycle water. If you want to make the argument that water is a bottleneck you are going to have to show that it is an unsolvable bottleneck. I doubt that is the case.

If the water can be treated with existing conventional waste water treatment technologies (and other posters say it can) then the question we need to answer is "At what cost per barrel?". If the answer still leaves the cost of bitumen oil below $70 per barrel that technology can remove the water bottleneck as soon as the water supply becomes the bottleneck. If the cost makes the oil cost another $10 or $20 per barrel then we'll just have to wait 2 or 3 years until oil becomes even more expensive.

The natural gas cost brings us to a similar question: At what cost of natural gas does nuclear power become a competitive alternative? Does natural gas already cost so much that nuclear power is cheaper? If so then what is probably holding back a big move to nuclear power is an industry fear that natural gas prices might fall.

So far I do not see that you've proved either a technical or an economic argument for why bitumen oil production can't be scaled up.

Even the environmental argument is not convincing. Lots of industries have cleaned up their acts when forced to and in most cases they did so at lower costs than they projected when they were arguing against environmental regulations. The real problem with pollution in the Fort McMurray area comes from lack of political will to force the oil industry to clean up their acts. They can do it.

Don't say you were not warned. There was some article by some energy analyst which I can cite only from memory:

"The greatest mistake of enviromentalists is they think oil will be replaced by clean and renewable technologies. In fact it will be replaced by the most economical and dirty technologies known to humans - tar sands, oil shale, CTL."

And the facts are supporting this claim - already tar sands are producing more energy than all alternative energy sources combined. For example the whole world wind industry (of ~70GW) is producing the energy equivalent of 250,000 bpd. while tar sands alone are producing 1mln.bpd. Biofuels are some 500,000bpd - and they are already causing problems by themselves. This means that "clean" alternative energy is already far behind "dirty" alternative energy and all indications are that it will stay that way - consider the $$$ invested in each.

You are right that there are some contraints over current tar sands production. But you have to spend more time to prove these are not just short-term bottlenecks. For example the water problem can be solved with building pipelines from nearby lakes or even from the sea. Wastewater can be further treated and recovered. And there is a very easy (and dirty!) way to go around NG shortfall - burn the tar sands themselves, potentially doubling emissions. And it will be a very long time hydrogen for the upgrade process becomes a problem - NG used as a hydrogen source is of relatively small amount compared to the NG used to produce the steam.

The bottomline is that it will require a paradigm shift to stop what-is-already-on-the line from hapenning. We have to build electric transportation, we have to build more nukes, wind and solar. We have to simply ban and phase out ICEs and fossil fuel power plants. As long as those exist they will be fueled and they will spew their pollution. Our capitalist economy is unstoppable in doing this - corporations will greenwash projects like tar sands with couple of wind turbines or purchasing carbon "offsets" or whatever they come up with... and politicians will be bought and sold by the dozen to participate in this theater. In the end all of us will collectively trash this planet with our clean and greenwashed conscious untroubled.

With as fond as energy companies seem to be of digging, I'm very surprised they haven't invested in large scale geothermal.

All the heat we could ever need for steam generated electricity is only 2-3 miles away.

In a silly simple scenario, take one of those tunnel boring machines, stand it on it's nose, and let 'er dig as far down as she'll go. Removing the tailings it leaves behind, of course.

Put the generating station at one mile down, and the water pipes going to the bottom. Build a closed loop system, so you don't have the issue that the geo project in Basel, CH ran into. It's non polluting, not an eyesore, silent and a virtually endless source.

Thank you for reviewing the tar sand situation. The technology employed in exploiting the tar sands is simply not sustainable or viable in the long run. As an alternative to fossil fuels we need a resource that is plentiful and renewable and also which is not variable. It is important in our modern society that energy must be secure and plentiful for its growth. A company called Genesys, LLC, web site: www.genesys-hydrogen.com has come up with a technology that addresses that issue. The technology is based on cracking the OH bond in water. The only ingredient is heat and water. Since these two elements are in great abundance, this approach could in the long run solve both global warming and peak oil issues.

This article is tremendously biased, and appears to be cherry-picking the worst statistics it can find, even when there's strong evidence those statistics are not applicable. For example:

Tar sands plants typically use two to four barrels of water to extract a barrel of oil.

From the June 2006 National Energy Board report, p.38, we learn:

"Between 2 to 4.5 barrels of water are withdrawn...to produce each barrel of synthetic crude oil (SCO) in a mining operation....In SAGD operations, 90 to 95 percent of the water used for steam to recover bitumen is reused, but for every cubic metre (6.3 barrels) of bitumen produced, about 0.2 cubic metres (1.3 barrels) of additional groundwater must be used."

i.e., the claimed statistic of 2-4x as much water is only true for mining operations, which appear to be playing a decreasing role, and can't even access most of the resource base anyway (due to depth). The newer technologies, such as SAGD, use vastly less water - apparently 10-20 times less, after recycling - so claiming the consumption rate for mining operations applies to all tar sands operations is highly misleading.

tar sands are produced using natural gas to heat the steam that drives the oil out of the sands. It takes a lot of gas to do this: over 1,000 cubic feet--about $8 worth--to produce one barrel of bitumen.

One area where mining operations are more efficient is in their use of natural gas; figure 3.8 (p.17) points out that it's only those water-efficient in situ methods that use 1mcf/bbl, while the mining operations use 40% less natural gas. So, in fact, there appears to be no class of methods that consumes as much water and natural gas as the article claims.

Canada's natural gas supplies are running out fast. Numbers from the EIA and the NEB suggest that its proven reserves of natural gas will be gone in about eight years.

The EIA says that Canada's natural gas reserves have fallen from 65Tcf to 56Tcf in the last 10 years, despite production of 65Tcf. Simply dividing the proven reserves by the production rate and pretending that gives a sensible estimate of the productive capacity of a region completely ignores historical evidence, and is grossly misleading.

In the face of gross errors such as those, bald assertions such as:

the total Energy Return On Investment...for tar sands production is typically only around 5% to 10%.

are extremely difficult to believe. Without evidence, the article has no credibility to anyone who does not already agree with its conclusions.

In the interest of scientific fairness

"Scientific fairness" is a nonsense phrase composed of two pleasant-sounding buzzwords almost certainly intended to paint a thin veneer of objectivity over a deeply-biased piece of writing, and makes the piece sound intentionally deceptive.

(Google "scientific fairness" if you don't believe me - the only use I've found of the phrase is the Scientific Fairness for Women Act, which is about breast implants and emergency contraception for minors.)

Of course, that's hardly the limit of the bias:

A primeval boreal forest the size of Florida is being utterly destroyed beyond repair

A totally misleading statement. What is actually true is that the amount of boreal forest which would be destroyed if all oil sands deposits were exploited would be less than 10% of the amount claimed. Current operations cover well under 10% of that, meaning that the amount of land being "destroyed" is less than 1% of the amount claimed.

Before anyone starts jumping to conclusions, keep in mind that I'm not saying the tar sands developments are a good thing, or a wise thing, or an environmentally sound thing. What I am saying is that this article contains virtually no evidence to support its claims and is demonstrably wrong in so many fundamental ways as to render it entirely unreliable as a source of information.

Just because something agrees with you doesn't mean it's correct; more people here need to remember that.

For those who may have missed it....

http://canada.theoildrum.com/node/2907#more

I have been saying for years that if the natural gas consumption issue cannot be resolved, tar sand oil is almost a crime.

On the environmental issues...what can we say? I am from Kentucky, where we are now using mountaintop removal blasting to get to the coal....and Al Gore gets himself all wound up about the Canadian tar sand, when right here in a border state of Tennessee, we are blasting to bits one of the most ecologically diverse biosphere's in the world....last year, East Kentucky was the largest consumer other than the military of explosives. It is a horror, as millions of acres are destined to become "mono cultural" landscapes, replacing rare flowers, insects, ferns, mosses, trees, and animals with what is essentially a rapidly istalled cover crop in the so called "reclamation".

The propaganda is working though, the coal companies fly over and take a picture, and say see, it's green, we fixed it. :-(

Back to the tar sands.....if something like THAI doesn't work, we can be rest assured that as soon as the stranded gas runs out, and the tar sand developers have to buy natural gas at world market prices....Fort McMurrey will be one of those legendary Western ghost towns.

RC

I'm not sure the relevance of name calling or even labelling - "running dog capitalist company shill" - "money grubbing peak oil lobbyist greenie " I have to assume everyone on this site is lying, as anyone else can make the same claim that I do: I am a oil company CEO or maybe a thermonuclear tar sand extraction expert. (If you care I'm a 'small' commercial pilot who burns hundreds of litres of jet fuel at work and rides a bike or an electric scooter).

However, I am suspicious of 'energy' industries that cannot economically (using traditional accounting, not even counting life cycle costs or externalities) use their own products. I have heard a rumour that some ethanol plants use coal for distillation. If true that is poor evidence for efficiency, and evidence of a tax loophole or political subsidies. Is there any ethanol plant that burns ethanol to distill ethanol? Is there a tarsands company that uses syncrude to power the extraction?

Heel to Toe Air Injection appears to use subterranean combustion of the tarsands to extract the bitumen. This implies that the product is 'cheap enough to burn' to produce syncrude. Perhaps the advantage lies in not pumping out and processing the fuel.

I haven't personally seen the tarsands but I lived in Yellowknife for a few years where climate change, the Mackensie Vally NG pipeline and tarsands news is much more local, and I heard a lot of unpleasant information. Just the 'normal' foothills gasfield extraction infrastructure (seismic cutlines, well heads and collector pipes) appears very disruptive from the air. I can only imagine open pit sand mining.

You can download an mp3 of the classic radio piece "Canada's Tar Baby" at:

www.ecoshock.org/podcasts/011406GBTarBaby.mp3

It's 11 minutes of hilarious facts about this hideous project.
Alex Smith
host
Radio Ecoshock
www.ecoshock.org