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

EROEI

[AndrewHowe]

Energy Return On Energy Invested.

Middle East oil has an EROEI of something like 30. That is, you get 31 barrels out of the ground, and you get to use 30 barrels of it for useful work. The other barrel is used to pump it out of the ground, refine it, ship it to your neighbourhood and pump it into your tank.

Oil from tar sands has an EROEI of about 1.5, so you waste 2 barrels for every 3 you get to guzzle. That's utterly shite, basically. Perhaps that figure has been improved recently with newer techniques, but it's not going to be competitive with M.E. oil until the latter has pretty much dried up.

The other bummer about tar sands oil is that it's really low quality, full of sulphur etc.

Re:True

[Anonymous Coward]

The only sustainable solution is thinning the herd. I'd rather have 100M hominids living in comfort in a paradise than 10G barely subsisting in a spoiled world.

And no, I don't need to be part of that select 100M. I'm willing to go, anonymous and forgotten, if need be.

I am definitely afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

of whoever modded this tripe insightful.

Just for the record, foreign opinion of US elections is worth approximately its weight in dog turds. You may hate us, be afraid of us, or just hide your envy of us. Don't worry, you can still cross the border and join up. We'll let you, even if we don't like you very much. This is still a great place, despite your half-baked, Michael Moore forcefed opinions.

Also, for those of you who claim dissent is dead in the US, does 'f911' do anything to change that, or are you happy being internally inconsistent?

Fossils

[GreyOrange]

Maybe I'm mistaken, but aren't there fossils in tar pits? I mean if we process this stuff, could we lose valuable information about previous life forms that would not be found in the other types of oil reserves?

Re:Hmm

[nelsonal]

I'd make a rough guess that $500 billion (in current dollars) has been spent on finding and extracting oil from the ground (no royalties or other wealth transfers just the economic costs). That same $500 billion would no doubt have improved our automotive technologies considerably, however I firmly doubt that alternate energy sources would be competitive with pulling the stored energy from the ground. Batteries are nowhere near the same energy density, and it requires considerable land, energy, and effort to grow corn or soybeans (or eventually algae) to replace the oil. Also if you go electric, would $500 billion pay for enough dams, solar power grids (and technology improvments), and wind farms to completely replace our transportation system? $500 million sounds like an awful lot of money, but on that scale it's pretty small. The world uses roughly 70 million barrels of oil per day. Each barrel contains roughly 5.8 million BTUs of energy, other than vegetable oil and ethanol, there isn't much that comes close, and I will put dollars to doughnuts (you gotta send krispy kremes if you have one) that it would take well more than $500 million to produce enough corn or soybeans to make the same 400 trillion BTUs of energy we get from the ground.
Assuming Hibbert (and Hoteling) are right (I have almost no doubt either are) we will begin using alternate energy when the extraction costs are similar probably in the next two decades (that is a SWAG). That said you are considerably more long term in mindset than most American's or /.ers. My potential errors are grossly underestimating the productivity of R&D in alternate energy sources.