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The Trillion-Barrel Tar Pit
An anonymous reader writes "The latest issue of Wired has an interesting article about Canadian tar pits that could result in a trillion barrels of oil when processed. It seems just when we think the oil will run out we find new reserves. Now excuse me while I gas up my Hummer."
The tar pits aren't fully exploited because it's much harder to extract oil from them than to buy it from the Arabs, Russians, South Americans, etc...
Canadian tar pits that could result in a trillion barrels of oil when processed.
The oil locked into the Athabascan tar sands have been known for a number of decades; experts in the 1970's were trying to figure out economical ways of extracting the oil.
The article claims extraction is now possible for $10 per bbl.
I'm skeptical. The figure probably assumes some economies of scale in production to arrive at a cost that, if compared to recent prices, would make it a no-brainer to go forward.
Then, too, there's always the issue of how much sulfur is in this oil, which can affect the downstream price at the refinery.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Probably not, in the whole scheme of things, very little gets spent finding new, better energy sources. The biggest cost to energy is converting sunlight to a more useful form (usually electric or chemical) the advantage with oil is that is complete you just have to find it, and most of the reserves already found it was either know for eons and was regarded as a nusiance (La Brea tar pits etc) as oil soaked ground is not as useful for travel or crop growing. We have put considerable resources into getting it out of the ground but that amount pales in comparison to the costs of developing a better method (and building infastructure to utilize) of converting energy from sunlight to chemical or electric energy. Besides very few alternate energy sources are as mobile as petroleum products. Ethanol and biodiesel are but batteries aren't close yet.
These oil sands aren't new, prices just finally got high enough to make it cost effective to extract it (profitable at ~$35/barrel).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I think that most Canadians have known about the Alberta tar sands since grade school.
:)
(For those who haven't read the article: basically, Canada has one of the largest oil reserves, but it's tied up in a sandy, tar-like muck. This makes the oil too difficult to extract, and less economically feasible compared to, say, invading an entire middle east country.
Canada also has very large supplies of drinking water (which may one day become an even more important resource), not to mention some of the world's largest reserves of uranium, potash, natural gas, and several precious metals.
3 - 2 = 1.5 ??
No, three DIVIDED by two is 1.5.
The original poster's math was correct.
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There's plenty of oil still left on the earth... you know those numbers that the 'death, doom and destruction' crowd keep throwing around, the 'We'll be out of oil in the next 20 years!' stuff? That's based upon an estimate of what's available that is as EASY to get at as what is currently being used. The nations of the world know of vast amounts of oil that can be used, it's just that currently, the Middle East, Russia, Venezuela and a couple other countries have stocks that are far, far cheaper to process.
The Canadiens have known about that oil field for a long time now, decades at least. There's just one problem with it: it's not in caverns that can be overpressured like the Saudi fields, it's locked up in sand, you litterally have to mine it. It's just recently that that field is beginning to look profitable. That's a combination of a) rising oil prices and b) advancing technology.
The oil that is easy to process (read: cheap) WILL be gone in 30-40 years. The oil that's just a little harder to process will take up the slack. We, the world, won't suffer a true shortage of oil for a long, long time.
Does that mean that we shouldn't be searching for alternatives? Not at all. As a matter of fact, as the price of oil rises, alternate energy sources will become cheaper and cheaper by comparison, if not in actuality. For exactly the same two reasons listed above, there will come a time when there is actual INCENTIVE to put large amounts of funding towards finding different ways to power our transportation/electrical systems: a) rising oil prices and b) advancing technology, but this time in fields unrelated to processing oil. Until then, however, most of the monies spent looking for alternatives can probably be better spent on technologies to cheapen refining the more difficult oil reserves.
Please note: I'm completely ignoring what using fossil fuels does to the environment in this post as it's not germane to the discussion. That, and for whatever reason, ecological reasons don't sit well with U.S. consumers. But that too, will sort itself out as oil prices rise.
- $169 billion to build the algae farms
- $33B/year operating costs
what comes out can be processed in conventional oil refineries.You can look at them for yourself at the University of New Hampshire site here This is largely based on research successfully completed at DOE in the mid 1990s and shelved because cheap oil looked like forever back then.
Other than that, remember $250/ton shipping to LEO? Follow the links from the slashdot article, to JP Aerospace and to evaluations by experts. From what I saw at the JP Aerospace site, the only reason why it's going to take 7 years for them to get to orbit is lack of funding. They're getting DOD experimental contracts for high-altitude transportation, but even with this, they're bootstrapping. The NASA space power satellite system was planned on a basis of $400/kg shipping cost. $250/ton is a lot cheaper than $400/kg.
The only thing keeping these technologies from becoming a viable alternative in the very near term is bad habit on the part of what passes for our business and governmental leadership. They're obsessed with the idea that the only way to get oil is the traditional methods. Even if the cost estimates for biomass oil and the SPS are off by a factor of 10, they look awfully good next to the projected $16T (yes, that's $16,000 billion) dollar cost of "business as usual"... based on an unproven and unlikely assumption that "enough" oil is there to be found. (see below)
Hint: The Bush Administration defunded the Space Power Satellite project.
Concrete steps to get this running? For the oil side, how about government loans, tax credits, and temporary price supports in case the oil cartel gets desperate enough to try to put the new energy replacements out of business by dropping their oil prices to cost of production? A promise to the rest of the world that the algae oil biomass production technology will be freely exported as soon as it is ready to go? These are the first things that occur to me.
For the space side, direct government funding, and or payload guarantees (e.g. the government will guarantee payment for X-million pounds per year of payload to any vendor(s) who can prove the ability to get it to LEO for, say, under $10/pound?) would be a good start. Or start contracting for lots and lots of solar cells and designate JP Aerospace as the prime contractor to get them to orbit.
The alternative: The International Energy Agency wants $16 TRILLION DOLLARS to be spent on new oil exploration and development and facilities to "prevent" energy crisis. This makes the happy assumption that there's enough oil to solve the problem. A few minutes spent googling on "peak oil" will convince you that there isn't.
The $16T does NOT include the military costs of dealing with the Middle East.
Personally, I'd rather see $16T spent on something useful.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'm not too optimistic about coal bed methane until gas prices increase substantially.
Actually, CBM already accounts for 8% of US natural gas production (and this increase came before the price run-up of the last 3 years).
Gas Hydrates, on the other hand, have the problem that they don't appear to actually exist in any usable form, which is a problem.
That energy is obtained from fossil fuels.
Corn ethanol is no more than a tax subsidy for farmers, it certainly does not replace petroleum and gas.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Thus, for a 1.5:1 ratio, which is 3:2, that means if you extract 5 barrels, you consume 2 in the process.
Yes. That's exactly what he said, he just phrased the second example a bit differently than first example.
He said you get to guzzle 3. That's 3 usuable, not 3 total pumped. The guzzlable 3 plus the wasted 2 implied the 5 total pumped.
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"...aren't there fossils in tar pits?"
Fossils are found in the La Brea tar pits because they got trapped in the sticky tar. This started happening a few tens of thousands of years ago, after the tar was exposed on the surface. The tar was formed millions of years ago, but the extreme conditions that change buried organic matter to tar don't preserve fossils.
The tar sands have had no opportunity to acquire fossils except for the surface layer; and, since they are not sticky like real tar pits, not a large number even there.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)