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.

$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.

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.

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.

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!