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DantesPeak wrote:A Crash Program Scenario for the Canadian Oil Sands Industry
Bengt Soderbergh, Fredrik Robelius and Kjell Aleklett
Contact: Kjell Aleklett
Uppsala Hydrocarbon Depletion Study Group
Uppsala University, Box 535, SE-751 21, Sweden
Contact e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract
The report Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management, by Robert L. Hirsch et al., concludes that Peak Oil is going to happen and that worldwide large-scale mitigation efforts are necessary to avoid its possible devastating effects for the world economy. These efforts include accelerated production, referred to as crash program production, from Canada’s oil sands. The objective of this article is to investigate and analyse what production levels that might be reasonable to expect from a crash program for the Canadian oil sands industry, within the time frame 2006-2018 and 2006-2050. The implementation of a crash program for the Canadian oil sands industry is associated with serious difficulties. There is not a large enough supply of natural gas to support a future Canadian oil sands industry with today’s dependence on natural gas. It is possible to use bitumen as fuel and for upgrading, although it seems to be incompatible with Canada’s obligations under the Kyoto treaty. For practical long-term high production, Canada must construct nuclear facilities to generate energy for the in situ projects. Even in a very optimistic scenario Canada’s oil sands will not prevent Peak Oil. A short-term crash program from the Canadian oil sands industry achieves about 3.6 mb/d by 2018. A long-term Crash program results in a production of approximately 5 mb/d by 2030.

Building a country or a region’s economy on the extraction of a resource is fool hardy. A resource extracted is gone! It is no longer there! Inevitably payday will come, maybe not within our lifetime, maybe not within our children’s lifetime, but it will come. True, by the time that resource is extracted, there may be new technology that reduces our need for that particular resource, but those who believe that have an extraordinary amount of faith in human ingenuity. Surely it is better to avoid building an economy on resource extraction if at all possible. I’ve been thinking about this a lot these days as I have been monitoring Alberta’s current dispute with BC. As I see it, here is the basic dispute: Alberta has this vast under-exploited resource of oil sands. In order to benefit from this resource, it

ROCKMAN wrote:The mistake comes from not using that strength to develop other opportunities especially when that strength comes from a depleting resource. And that resource need not be a natural one. Consider the powerhouse Detroit once was due to the auto industry. But foreign competition took that away. And the Detroit economy, having done little to expand beyond auto production, has suffered greatly as a result.