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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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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
- $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.
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