[whereagles]

All in all, I think the Albertan tar sands 'boom' is fairly characteristic of most oil-enterprising operations...raping the sh*t out of the available resources to extract the maximum amount of profit at the maximum rate, and to hell with anything else.

But hey, a guy's gotta make a buck, right? We've all got mortgages after all.

yeah... at this stage one wonders whether mankind is able to survive itself.

[threadbear]

Classic Spiderman could have summed up the gist of his thread with a little nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.

Aren't we lucky to have pinheads like this at the pinnacle of power? Stephen Harpur our new pm is on the same page. But I'm loving it, because these guys are going to suffer big time in a wave of demand destruction coming really soon. And who deserves it more. Tards.

[FairMaiden]

Alberta is a joke. You do NOT own the land under your land in Alberta. So if the oil company finds oil under your ranch/farm/etc - they have every right to plop a big oil rig in the middle of your backyard and there isn't a dang thing you can do about it. There have been many lawsuits of individuals suffered miscarriages, deformed babies and cancer-related illness from having these rigs right next to their homes.

And universal medical?? Are you NUTS? Alberta has been pushing for a user pay medical system for years. The richest province in Canada and they want everyone to pay for their own medical. Its like a third world country - selling off its resources with no long term investmen and planning...good luck when you run out of water/natural gas/etc...then you'll have the "no growth" dead towns the likes of suburban Detroit or the dreaded S. Ontario you speak of...

And most of my relatives live in Alberta - they are constantly trying to talk me into moving there bc they could set me up with a big, high paying cushy job *(in the oil industry)!

[Eddie_lomax]

Well the water actually is made into lakes, nice black foul smelling lakes of contaminated waste water.

Excellent, and there was me worrying that we would have nothing to leave future generations

[AtmaStorm]

I've always thought the tar sands as a source for oil was a sham.
1. It takes far more energy to turn up the earth to get at the bitumen than a drilling operation; oil extract has the benefit of the deep underground pressure as an assist. With tar sands, you gotta haul it out manually.
2. Water presents several issues, including the one discussed in this thread.
What has really bothered me is the steam; water needs lots of thermal energy to get it boiling, therefore affecting the energy units in vs energy units out signifigantly.
3. What happens to all these toxic lakes left over from processing?
They just sit there till the end of time? They're a huge ecologic threat,
and some of the gases coming of it are nasty as hell. Not just that, but some of the longer chain hydrocarbons that slipped through will begin to decompose with constant exposure to the elements.
I picture myself in a nearby town wondering why the horizon has a brown haze. In addition, is there some sort of containment around these lakes? If I live in Alberta I'd think about moving at the worst.
If one of these lakes seeps it contents into underground streams then the shit hits the fan big time.

P.S. I forget the ratio of energy units in vs energy units out for tar sands, anyone got the figure?

[Raxozanne]

P.S. I forget the ratio of energy units in vs energy units out for tar sands, anyone got the figure?

http://www.eroei.com/eval/net_energy_list.html

It's in the list somewhere.

[KevO]

"As we know, the oil sands and oil shales of Canada are put forward as one of the reasons why oil isn’t running out, why there is still a century or more of supplies to use. So this doesn’t look good:

However, before the peak oil crowd start crowing about how it shows that the process will never make sense, will never really amount to much, it’s worth looking at what (well, at least what Shell say) is the problem. It isn’t the process itself, isn’t something wrong with the whole idea. It’s simply a result of an overheated market:"

full article
HERE

and also
"SHELL is facing a cost explosion in the expansion of the Athabasca Oil Sands Project, a mining venture that extracts oil from bitumen deposits in the Canadian province of Alberta.

The first phase of expansion, intended to add 100,000 barrels daily to the current 155,000 barrel per day output was budgeted at C$7.3 billion (£3.6 billion) only a year ago. It is now expected to cost as much as C$11 billion, according to estimates published by Western Oil Sands, Shell’s partner in the project.

Shell Canada said yesterday that it was conducting an assurance review of the project’s cost, pending a final investment decision later this year. Planned in three phases, the Athabasca expansion is intended to raise output to 500,000 bpd, and represents a large part of Shell’s oil production ambitions.

Shell admitted to “significant upward pressure on capital costs” but declined to confirm its partner’s prediction of a 50 per cent increase."

more on that
HERE

What's it all mean?
Oil sands will be too expensive to develop having a ngative EROEI?

[Sleepybag]

Oil sands will be too expensive to develop having a ngative EROEI?

I guess you mean an EROEI between 0 and 1.

It is quite possible that oil companies will be interested in fuels that have an EROEI below 1. When the result is a liquid 'gasoline' then this might be worth the loss of energy. So therefor, tar, coal, natural gas, corn and switchgrass can all go into one side of the factory, as long as some commercially viable gasoline replacement comes out on the other end. The corn-to-ethanol factories in the Midwest use coal for the transformation process.

[MacG]

What's it all mean? Oil sands will be too expensive to develop having a ngative EROEI?

Most probably: Yes

The same goes for biofuels. At $20 oil, biofuels will be viable at $40, at $40 oil, biofuels will be viable at $60 etc, etc.

The infrastructure used to extract the tar sands was built with $20-$50 oil, but with infrastructure built with $75 oil, the tar sands will yield $100 oil. And so on and so on....

[Heineken]

As conventional sources of fuels deplete, the cost of "alternatives" will continue to rise along with the cost of everything else---another reason why we're screwed.

[shortonoil]

Heineken said:

As conventional sources of fuels deplete, the cost of "alternatives" will continue to rise along with the cost of everything else---another reason why we're screwed.

Exactly the problem. This is a 1’st and 2’nd Law problem, which no one, even the oil companies seem to understand. The incremental energy output of oil is growing slower than the incremental energy input that is necessary to extract it. The slope of the ERoEI vs. time graph for conventional oil is at or very close to -1. As the slope of conventional oil’s ERoEI falls toward zero, above -1, the ERoEI of most non-conventional sources will go negative. This is because most of them are highly dependent on conventional oil for their processing and maintenance.

[DantesPeak]

In case anyone missed my prior thread on this, Canada released a comprehensive report on pipeline constraints in Western Canada.

Costs will not be the only thing restraining oil sands production.

Link to full report:

National Energy Board

[Fergus]

In case anyone missed my prior thread on this, Canada released a comprehensive report on pipeline constraints in Western Canada.

Costs will not be the only thing restraining oil sands production.

Link to full report:

National Energy Board

Wow, it just keeps getting darker and darker doesn't it?

[Kingcoal]

Actually, Peak Oil is really just a hydrogen shortage. As long as cheap hydrogen is available, it is true that you can make all the hydrocarbons you want and make them relatively cheap. We're up to our ears in carbon; the coveted cheap hydrogen however is becoming scarce. For the uninitiated, we make hydrogen from natural gas.

[LadyRuby]

Time to get our head out of the oil sands

An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's film about climate change, has opened in a Calgary theatre in the shadows of the city's energy industry towers. Will many people who work in those towers be buying a ticket? Not likely.

Mr. Gore's message is one a lot of Albertans (and other Canadians, including the Harper government) don't want to hear. The film, of course, is all about Mr. Gore, which has fuelled speculation about a political comeback for the former U.S. vice-president.

But it's also a serious, albeit one-sided, documentary about the perils of global warming. A Calgary-based academic expert on climate change who went to the film skeptical about Mr. Gore's grasp of the issue emerged satisfied that the defeated presidential candidate has gotten the science right.

That affirmation contrasted with Premier Ralph Klein's dismissal of Mr. Gore as someone on the "far left," a preposterous comment that said more about Mr. Klein's place on the world's political spectrum than Mr. Gore's. Fortunately, Alberta has only a few more months to suffer the embarrassing Mr. Klein, who'll be gone by year's end.

There remains plenty of denial in certain Alberta circles about climate change. For every company whose senior executives are concerned about the issue and accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that the problem exists -- companies such as Nexen, TransAlta or Shell -- there are others, such as Imperial Oil and EnCana, that remain unconvinced.

...
In Ottawa, the Harper government is completely at sea. The Conservatives pronounced themselves opposed to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and promised a "made-in-Canada" alternative, without knowing what that might be.

...

Believe it or not, some representatives of the Alberta oil and gas industry suggested to the Harper government that it legislate greenhouse-gas emissions for large carbon emitters such as themselves, but the government turned the suggestion down because some ministers don't believe that human activity causes global warming. Imagine: An industry suggests government impose burdens on it, and the government refuses!

...
A strong climate-change policy would have many dimensions: from using price to change consumer behaviour, investments in technology, alternative energy sources. The Conservatives, however, are likely to choose only one or two high-profile measures and call it a climate-change policy, which of course it won't be.

One good choice would be carbon capture and storage, or sequestration. Companies are already doing some of this in Alberta. A carbon pipeline was just announced this week.

...

Before focus can be sustained on capture-and-storage or anything else in the climate-change field, there's a deal that should be made.

Environmentalists should admit that the Canadian commitments in the first round of Kyoto will not be met, since to meet them would require spending billions of dollars to buy some other country's emissions credits -- a really, really dumb idea. And skeptics in the Klein and Harper governments, and head-in-the-sand elements of the energy industry should do a little reading and inform themselves that climate change is real and caused largely by human activities.

With those two admissions, and a little political leadership, Alberta and Canada can get on with concrete steps to improve the country's embarrassing climate-change record.

[WildRose]

The level of destruction of Alberta's landscape and the greenhouse gas emissions caused by tars sands development really is disastrous. Alberta is ahead of Ontario in gas emissions even though the population of Ontario is four times that of Alberta and Ontario has most of the other sectors of industry in Canada.

Some, like former Alberta premier Lougheed, are calling for restraints on oil sands production for the climate change reasons above, and also because the industry is using natural gas at an alarming rate (how will Albertans heat their homes in the future?) and because of the problems with a boom and bust economy.

I don't know what it will take to advance initiatives to slow down this destruction. While many (if not all) of those in the industry are aware of the problems for the environment, they are unwilling to do anything about them. And, with so many in Alberta's population profiting from the increased oil sands activity (housing prices in Calgary increasing by 50% in the last year as an indicator), it's not hard to see why the "heads are buried so far in the sands".

[FatherOfTwo]

Time to get our head out of the oil sands

An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's film about climate change, has opened in a Calgary theatre in the shadows of the city's energy industry towers. Will many people who work in those towers be buying a ticket? Not likely.

Mr. Gore's message is one a lot of Albertans (and other Canadians, including the Harper government) don't want to hear. The film, of course, is all about Mr. Gore, which has fuelled speculation about a political comeback for the former U.S. vice-president.

But it's also a serious, albeit one-sided, documentary about the perils of global warming. A Calgary-based academic expert on climate change who went to the film skeptical about Mr. Gore's grasp of the issue emerged satisfied that the defeated presidential candidate has gotten the science right.

That affirmation contrasted with Premier Ralph Klein's dismissal of Mr. Gore as someone on the "far left," a preposterous comment that said more about Mr. Klein's place on the world's political spectrum than Mr. Gore's. Fortunately, Alberta has only a few more months to suffer the embarrassing Mr. Klein, who'll be gone by year's end.

There remains plenty of denial in certain Alberta circles about climate change. For every company whose senior executives are concerned about the issue and accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that the problem exists -- companies such as Nexen, TransAlta or Shell -- there are others, such as Imperial Oil and EnCana, that remain unconvinced.

...
In Ottawa, the Harper government is completely at sea. The Conservatives pronounced themselves opposed to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and promised a "made-in-Canada" alternative, without knowing what that might be.

...

Believe it or not, some representatives of the Alberta oil and gas industry suggested to the Harper government that it legislate greenhouse-gas emissions for large carbon emitters such as themselves, but the government turned the suggestion down because some ministers don't believe that human activity causes global warming. Imagine: An industry suggests government impose burdens on it, and the government refuses!

...
A strong climate-change policy would have many dimensions: from using price to change consumer behaviour, investments in technology, alternative energy sources. The Conservatives, however, are likely to choose only one or two high-profile measures and call it a climate-change policy, which of course it won't be.

One good choice would be carbon capture and storage, or sequestration. Companies are already doing some of this in Alberta. A carbon pipeline was just announced this week.

...

Before focus can be sustained on capture-and-storage or anything else in the climate-change field, there's a deal that should be made.

Environmentalists should admit that the Canadian commitments in the first round of Kyoto will not be met, since to meet them would require spending billions of dollars to buy some other country's emissions credits -- a really, really dumb idea. And skeptics in the Klein and Harper governments, and head-in-the-sand elements of the energy industry should do a little reading and inform themselves that climate change is real and caused largely by human activities.

With those two admissions, and a little political leadership, Alberta and Canada can get on with concrete steps to improve the country's embarrassing climate-change record.

I have a real problem with that article because it makes it out like those who work in the oil industry, and specifically those involved in oil sands operations, are somehow now responsible for stopping the world's fossil fuel binge. I'd like to see some firm quotes that the Executives doubt the science behind GW. Total strawman. (I'm sure there are some, but not many, at least not from what my first had experience has shown me.)

It's like going after the drug pusher and throwing them in jail when really what you have to do is target the demand.

Most Calgarians in general know the real scoop on GW. Are they disturbed enough by it to, for instance, quit their jobs at one of the many oil&gas majors in Calgary? Of course not. Are most American's disturbed enough to stop driving their cars? Nope. So the dance continues.

Gore was right, there is a huge amount of energy and environmental impact by going after the oil sands. But Ralph Klein (the outgoing Premier) also had a good retort:

"The United States needs our oil. I don't know what he proposes the world run on. Maybe hot air?"

[PraireRanger]

When has his administration done anything but? Klein et al wish to rape Alberta of her resources as fast as possible to reap the quick petrodollar. In that the possiblity of handing out another fat "prosperity cheque" whilst they lay off teachers, doctors and nurses. Good luck driving around in Alberta as well! Any highway leading north is a bloody deathtrap! I have seen cowtrails in northern BC better maintained! Social services have seen a 400% decrease since he came to power... Alberta is going to have a tailings pond the size of Lake Erie in 10 years at current recovery of the tar sands! Nevertheless, people keep voting him and his cronies into power because "he is doing so much good for the province... Look how much money he made us". NEWSFLASH PEOPLE! The Rhino party or even the NDP could have been in power, they could not have possibly screwed things up with that influx of cash!

[coyote]

“I’ve always advocated that you could have economic development and at the same time protect the environment,” Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns said.

People say things like this and have no clue about either economics or the environment.

[WildRose]

I say latest, because who knows how many birds lie in the bottom of these toxic ponds?

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada ... ?id=482931

This is so sad. The oil sands companies apparently have equipment in place that's supposed to prevent water fowl from landing on the ponds, but I wonder how effective these measures are.

According to the article above, these tailing ponds now cover 50 square kilometers and could collectively grow to cover quadruple the amount of area should all of the projects proposed in Alberta go ahead.

I wonder how many instances like this one just haven't been reported.