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

[be951]

...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?

It is possible, but not necessarily the case. Along with money, it takes time to adopt new technology. Also, we can build cars that get 80 or more miles to the gallon, zero emission vehicles, vehicles that use non-petroleum power sources, and various combinations of those and other "green" features. There are a number of reasons that "everyone" doesn't have these. First of all, cost is an issue. But there are many other factors -- both rational and emotional -- involved in purchasing a vehicle. Does it do what I need? Does it do what I want? Does it look how I want? Is it better in one of those areas than an alternative?

The short answer to why we aren't all driving super-high mileage vehicles is that we as consumers haven't demanded. We want fast, pretty, luxurious, big, cool, cheap, convenient, etc... cars more than we want highly efficient, enviro-friendly cars.

Re:Hmm

[Fat Cow]

i've got great news for you! you don't have to wonder - you can take your own money and invest in those alternative energy companies. if you're right you can make a bundle. hurrah!

Re:Hmm

[nelsonal]

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).

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.

Re:Hmm

[SpaceLifeForm]

Probably not, in the whole scheme of things, very little gets spent finding new, better energy sources.

Perhaps that is due to the controlling interests not wanting to give up that control.

Re:Hmm

[rburgess3]

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.

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.

Re:Hmm

[mikerich]

Just one drawback - the US puts about 8 times as much energy INTO producing crops as it extracts from those crops (by eating them, distilling them whatever). This number is called the Fuel Energy Subsidy and has been increasing through the last century thanks to the advent of mechanisation and artificial fertilisers.

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.

futurama

[Spudley]

If they drain all the oil out of the tar pits, it'll really mess up the plot for that episode of Futurama.

oil running out?

[Slowping]

The world has always had big reserves in many places, especially around Alaska and Canada. Why burn up your own reserves when you can eat away at others first?

For countries like US and Canada to open up their own reserves would just drive down oil prices and make the oil worth less. Wait until the global supply is lower and then you can get some real bang for the buck.

Re:oil running out?

[Baron_Yam]

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...

haha

[truffle]

I learned about this years again in grade 10 geography class. We canadians have 70% of the world's drinking water too. Bow down and worship us Americans!

Er wait

I mean, please don't invade us :/

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.

Re:How does this solve the problem?

[hal9000]

It's not only submerging history, it's fucking up the ecosystem of the entire region. Just like every dam does.

Re:How does this solve the problem?

[kawika]

Yep, hydroelectric power can do a lot of local damage. But it doesn't poison the whole world. Also, the floods it controls have killed thousands in the past, so there is a benefit. Unless the dam breaks--there are legitimate concerns about that.

Also, China is making an important strategic and economic decision by using hydroelectric. Their economy will not be dependent on foreign oil, and won't need to become involved in Middle Eastern politics to protect their country. Now there's a real tar pit.

Re:How does this solve the problem?

[mikerich]

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 oil crises were all political events caused by the taps being turned off. It's not really a fair comparison.

We are almost certainly at, or very close to, the peak of oil production - from here on it is a short plateau before oil production goes into an irreversible decline.

Most major provinces outside of the Middle East are (such as Venezuela or Nigeria) all now at their peak or past their peak (North America, and the North Sea). Countries like the UK which have been self-sufficient in oil are soon going to be looking to top up dwindling domestic reserves with imported fuel.

The Caspian, for all the excitement it raises has not actually transformed the world. Talk of 200 billion barrels in the region are at the far end of expectations, so that isn't going to bail us out.

There aren't many more big fields left to discover, what's left is in smaller fields, deeper down, harder to drill and with commensurate higher costs.

But at the same time, China and India have turned their growth to maximum. Both countries need to import oil and gas to maintain economic growth and both have plenty of hard cash to spend on fuel imports. Both are becoming major players in the Gulf where they are signing agreements to drill and produce oil for export to their own markets.

So even if oil isn't in immediate risk of vanishing from our lives, the World's addiction to the stuff is getting worse - not better. There may be plenty of oil down there - but will we be able to afford it?

Best wishes,
Mike.

True

[Mark_MF-WN]

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.

True. It sometimes seems like environmentalists wont be happy until we all live in caves. I care about the environment, but I also recognize that something has to give somewhere. Hydroelectric dams provide bountiful, clean electricity, at a fairly reasonable environmental cost. If China is embracing hyrdoelectric, I say more power to them.

Re:True

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, don't let anyone here stop you from taking that first step.

tarpit... oil... hummer...

[dpilot]

On /. a reference to 'tarpit' usually means something other than the type that holds oil, or at least petrochemicals.

Accept for a moment, the premise that hummers (and other gas-guzzlers) are generally undesirable, and then put that together with 'tarpit' in the normal /. sense.

We need to replace a stretch of road with a tarpit that'll look like a road, and be sufficiently stiff to support lighter vehicles, but swallow hummers and SUVs - like a /. tarpit swallows evil packets. If that fine a selection on stiffness/surface tension is too hard, how about making it the road to a gas station, "Cheap Gas - $1.50/gal - minimum purchase 20 gallons!"

$10 to produce?

[4of12]

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.

Re:$10 to produce?

[Rauser]

The oil sand that is mined at Syncrude is refined into "synthetic crude oil" that Syncrude produces at its Mildred Lake facility north of Ft. McMurray. The costs to produce this syncrude were in the $13-14/barrel when I was there in 2002. Compare this to the ~$35/barrel market costs for oil on the open market and the Canadians are making money hand-over-fist!

there's always the issue of how much sulfur is in this oil, which can affect the downstream price at the refinery.

The sulfur is removed at Mildred Lake, where they are compressing it into blocks and using it as a building material. It is too expensive to transport down to "civilization" so they are just stockpiling it.

The "synthetic crude" is pipelined down to Edmonton where it is further refined into gasoline, diesel, etc. These products are then distributed further, including by pipeline to the USA.

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:EROEI

[Alsee]

3 - 2 = 1.5 ??

No, three DIVIDED by two is 1.5.

The original poster's math was correct.

-

Re:EROEI

[Alsee]

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.

-

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.

Re:its really sad

[ConceptJunkie]

Well, we're going to need oil until those other choices are viable. It's not like we can wave a magic wand and declare "energy independence" and we suddenly have alternative energy sources to replace oil, despite what certain presidential candidates might think.

What we need to do is pursue other source while we look for more oil. They've been looking for other solutions for 100 years. The problem is the consumers will not want to trade their gasoline-powered cars for something else that will cost them a lot more. The problem with arguments like yours is that it assumes money just magically appears out of thin air.

THe main cause of international violence is corrupt governments that keep their people in abject poverty even though it isn't necessary, and then convincing them it is someone else's fault (the U.S., Israel, etc, etc).

That would be so sweet.

[base3]

Canada as leader of OPEC :).

Better watch your back

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause the minute you are worth something guess where the next couple of states are coming from?

No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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:Fossils

[DigiShaman]

If anything, fossils might be FOUND through tar extraction. Obviously they haven't found fossils now. What makes you think they will find them in undisturbed tar pits? For all we know, bones are resting at the bottom of the pits.

Re:Fossils

[WalksOnDirt]

"...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.

Annex Cannukistan

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Next on the list: Canada.

The Prime Minister of this so-called nation flies in a government-jet with the word "LIBERAL" in five-foot-high RED letters!

How long can the United States endure this antagonism to the world's freedom?

51 States Now! -plus Israel, U.K. and Puerto Rico, maybe Iraq.

But what about emissions?

[Via_Patrino]

But what about emissions? You keep having cheap gas but CO2 emissions go skyhigh the same way.

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!

Damn!

[msouth]

Now we'll have to start taking them seriously.

oil independence - closer than you think

[alizard]

The numbers for replacing foriegn oil are:

• $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.

Re:Extraction and coal mining

[fluffy666]

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.