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."

Comments

Hmm

[Analise]

Makes you wonder, if all the money being put into finding new sources of oil was instead put into new sources of energy, would we all be driving cars that get 80mpg and make almost no emissions? Or, you know, something like that.

Re:Hmm

[Zachary Kessin]

The thing is that for all we bitch about oil it does its job quite well. Oil and derived products (gas, jet fuel, Disiel fuel, heating oil etc) have several things going for them:

1) They have a high energy density. The fact is you can get a lot of useful work out of a gallon of auto gas.

2) They are reasonably stable at room tempurture. Yes they will burn but they won't explode for no reason (which some things will).

3) We have an infrastructure for them. From the drill to the pump a lot has been invested in making oil avalable.

4) We have a huge knowlege base. There a lot of people out there who know how to do a lot of useful things out of petro chemicals. From roughnecks to chemical engineers a lot of folks know how to do useful stuff here.

There is a lot of oil in the world. Right now there is a lot of oil that we know about but like the Canadian tar we haven't bothered to go after it because its a lot cheaper to get oil some where else. If for every $100 of oil it costs you $3 in Saudi Arabia but $60 in Canada to extract it which would you use? As the oil that is easy to get to is used up we will get creative about how to get the other stuff.

I imagine the fuel of the future will be Eathanol. You can make it by fermentation of sugars in plant products. But this also has problems, in that corn used for Eathanol can't be used for food or other things.

There is this myth that there is some perfect source of energy out there and if we would only spend 5 minutes looking we would find it. I wish it was so but I'm kind of skeptical. I mean if you did find it you would get quite rich. But so far its not happened. Other energy sources have problems as well.

How does this solve the problem?

[kawika]

There is no lack of oil at reasonable prices. Even with the recent price spike, US gas prices are lower in inflation-adjusted terms than they were during the "Oil Crisis" of the late-1970s. Prices would be a lot higher if we were running out of oil.

The problem comes if China and the Third World follow in the footsteps of our oil-wasteful economy. The planet's atmosphere is not going to like that. Although there's a lot of concern about the Three Gorges Dam in China, I would rather see them submerge some local Chinese history than throw tons of hydrocarbons into the world's atmosphere.

A Trillion? Is that a lot?

[merockhold]

At the current worldwide rate of consumption of about 80 million barrels a day, a trillion barrels would last almost 35 years. (That said, I've seen conservative estimates of growth in that rate to something like 140 mbd within 30 years. Whatever.) Anyhow, that puts us near the end of my personal life expectancy, so I'm OK with whatever the rest of you nuts do after that. You might check with my kids before you completely wreak the environment and run the world's tank down to the dregs, though.

Oil dependence

[SofaMan]

You know, we are, at some point, going to need to wean ourselves off of mineral oil, Middle Eastern or otherwise. It will get more expensive.

Many people have raised the quite legitimate concern about changing over to new automotive technologies, and I've got to tell you, biodiesel is looking better and better.

1. There's no significant change that needs to be implemented to current diesel automotive technology.
   
2. There's no significant change that needs to be implemented to current fuel distribution infrastructure.
   
3. Burning biodiesel is carbon-neutral i.e. all the carbon being released by it is carbon that was trapped by living plants in the first place, not carbon that was sucked out of the atmosphere and trapped millions of years ago when the climate and ecosystem was completely different. And we can start to use up a bunch of carbon that's already in the atmosphere causing problems.
   
4. It mean we can actually use huge areas of unusably salinated land again - certain types of oil-rich algae grow amazingly in shallow super-salty water.
   
5. You can make it yourself if you want (unless you live in Australia, where they have just declared that biodiesel attracts fuel excise, so by making your own you basically become a tax evader).
   

It won't replace the use of mineral oil for some time, but would be an important step on the way, by reducing the environmental, technological (combustion technology is still fairly inefficient, now well over a century old, with no significant changes in the basic principle in that time) and economic urgency for finding other energy alternatives. If we started talking about diesel electric hybrids, then we might be getting somewhere!