The tar sands

Canada's version of liquid coal

Posted by Joseph Romm (Guest Contributor) at 4:27 PM on 11 Oct 2007

Read more about: Canada | energy | oil | oil sands

Canada has about as much recoverable oil in its tar sands as Saudi Arabia has conventional oil. They should leave most of it in the ground.

Tar sands are pretty much the heavy gunk they sound like, and making liquid fuels from them requires huge amounts of energy for steam injection and refining. Canada is currently producing about one million barrels of oil a day from the tar sands, and that is projected to triple over the next two decades.

The tar sands are doubly dirty. On the one hand, the energy-intensive conversion of the tar sands directly generates two to four times the amount of greenhouse gases per barrel of final product as the production of conventional oil. On the other hand, Canada's increasing use of natural gas to exploit the tar sands is one reason that its exports of natural gas to U.S. are projected to shrink in the coming years.

So instead of selling clean-burning natural gas to this country, which we could use to stop the growth of carbon-intensive coal generation, Canada will provide us with a more carbon-intensive oil product to burn in our cars. That's lose-lose.

From a climate perspective, fully exploiting the tar sands resource would make Canada's climate policy as immoral as ours. The tar sands are almost as bad as liquid coal.

If you'd like to see some good recent critiques of the tar sands economics and impact, Energy and Capital has what you're looking for in two excellent posts. The first is on cost issue, and concludes:

If the royalties on the tar sands were allowed to rise to anywhere near the normal levels for oil-around 40%, not 1% -- the entire industry would cease to be. The profit would vanish, simple as that.

The second is on water, energy, labor, and the environment. The tar sands, like liquid coal, is a water hog. The article notes, "According to a recent joint study by the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta, the projected expansion of the tar sands projects will kill the Athabasca River, the only abundant source of water in the area."

Is Canada wise enough not to fully develop the tar sands? As of today, the answer appears to be "no."

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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4 Comments | Post a Comment

Just Getting Started

Tar sands are problematic for the status quo in several ways. First of all they destroy the "peak oil" argument, as energy from tar sands (known) give us 500 to 1000 years of abundant fossil fuel energy.

Second, the technology for extracting the fuel from the sands, while not to efficient now, is getting better and better. In fact, although we have known about shale for more than 30 years, it has only recently been efficient enough to go after it. Colorado, for example, in shale, has the largest "oil reserve" on the planet!

by jabailo at 9:25 AM on 13 Oct 2007

status quo

Extracting oil from tar sands may be a new technology, but the thinking behind it is centuries old. Tar sands oil extraction is the status quo. Tar sands oil recovery is simply applying old thinking to a new resource, using new technology. This is why technology will not solve our problems: because no matter how much we like to think that the new technology will absolve our environmental sins (it's cleaner! it's more efficient!), we are heading down a road that does not allow for sustainability, and our technology and resource use are irrevocably caught up in a mindset that does not allow for the one true solution to environmental problems: moderation.

As an example, the article notes that extracting oil from tar sands is water-intensive. This illustrates my point: the market imperfectly reflects the environmental costs (externalities), thereby overproviding some goods (like pollution) and underproviding others (like water for fish). Our markets can create incentives to explore or create new sources of energy, but they cannot create incentives to conserve energy, or to decentralize energy sources and make it less profitable. Most of the purported "solutions" to peak oil are not solutions at all. They are an extension of the status quo, which is an emphasis on technologically- and economically-based "fixes."

by blueberrysushi at 2:06 PM on 15 Oct 2007

Who are we to say?

Sure, we like to think energy policy is international and knows no borders - but who are we to dictate what Canada does on their lands? This is the height of hubris and arrogance and Canadians hate us when we act like that. If we were smart we'd work on our own problems here at home.

Apparently it is fashionable to pick on other countries for their energy practices but we're the Number One offender in the entire freaking world.

That's called being a hypocrite. If we're going to lead the world to new solutions we must lead by example and not the unilateral "Bush" method. If you don't like extracting oil from the tar sand, great. Best not to bring up that issue in a bar in Canada, though. Might be messy.

Onward through the fog

by Sam Wells at 2:38 PM on 15 Oct 2007

who we are to say

Well, no, we aren't the number one offender as far as energy exploitation goes. Not that we (and by we, I mean energy companies in the US) wouldn't jump at the chance to be the number one offender if there were tar sands as easily mined as in Alberta.

My impression is that Canadian energy attitudes parallels in many ways those in the US, with generally a western exploitation bias and eastern environmental alarm.

US environmentalists criticise US energy policy and actions all the time. Why shouldn't we also criticise similarly-stupid actions elsewhere? I think that not doing so would be hypocritical.

For symmetry, I welcome non-US criticism of US energy policy and actions, hoping that eventually the combination of internal embarrassment and external ridicule actually leads to change.

by In the belly at 3:18 PM on 15 Oct 2007

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