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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."
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.
>insert witty sig file here
If they drain all the oil out of the tar pits, it'll really mess up the plot for that episode of Futurama.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
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.
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*beware the cute-bunny virus
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
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I support spreading santorum
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.
On /. a reference to 'tarpit' usually means something other than the type that holds oil, or at least petrochemicals.
/. sense.
/. 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!"
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
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
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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."
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.
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.
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).
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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.
But what about emissions? You keep having cheap gas but CO2 emissions go skyhigh the same way.
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.
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!
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
Now we'll have to start taking them seriously.
Liberty uber alles.
- $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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