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Idea #10: We've Entered the Age of Energy-Intensive Oil

Exploiting new big reserves like the oil sands will create far more greenhouse gasses per barrel. Let's face that.

By Geoff Dembicki, 31 Dec 2010, TheTyee.ca

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[Editor's Note: This is last in our series of 10 New Ideas for 2011, creative thinking for improving our lives and communities. Find them all here.]

The world's oil supply is poised to shift into carbon overdrive as we finish what could be the hottest year in recorded history.

Analysts have for decades crafted doomsday scenarios about the decline of conventional fossil fuel supplies. It appears now the major issue isn't necessarily so much one of quantity.

Gigantic unconventional reserves lie virtually untapped across the planet. But the massive amounts of energy needed to get at them -- and hence, the greenhouse gases released -- is a thought that makes environmentalists bolt awake at night.

Alberta's oil sands, thought to contain the world’s second largest crude oil deposits, are the best known example of this precarious trade-off. The industry this year was set to become the number one source of U.S. crude oil imports.

Oil sands beyond Canada

With two major new pipelines now pumping Albertan fossil fuels into the American Midwest -- and another planned to the Texas Gulf Coast -- industry insiders expect production to triple over the next few decades.

The major downer of course is that producing fuel from thick northern Alberta bitumen releases 82 per cent more emissions than doing it from smooth-flowing conventional oil, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates.

In less than 10 years, the Pembina Institute warns, Canada's oil sands could be generating more greenhouse gases than New York City.

Yet it would be unfair to single out the Albertans, when so many other high-carbon fossil fuel deposits are poised for development. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez bragged this summer his country may have the biggest crude oil reserves this planet's ever seen.

The resource, like Alberta's, is thick and gooey and difficult to transport and refine. For now, most big Western oil companies distrust the government too much to set up there. But just you wait, Florida International research fellow Jorge Pinon told The Tyee this September, saying: "Venezuela is the biggest prize out there."

There's many smaller prizes too, scattered in unlikely pockets. An Israeli company began exploring this October for oil sands deposits in Inner Mongolia.

Hungry for Kerogen

Late this November, London market investors were given their first chance to buy into Madagascar Oil, an energy firm partnering with French Total to squeeze more than a billion barrels of Alberta-type bitumen from the politically unstable African island nation.

Russia, Trinidad and Tobago, Kuwait and China are also seen as potential heavy oil players. All these projections could someday look puny too, if the planet's oil shale resources ever yield the fossil fuel bonanza their proponents envision.

The American Petroleum Institute right now is wracking its members' brains to figure out how to blast a substance called Kerogen from solid rock in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.

If this modern-day alchemy proves commercially viable, the United States could begin exploiting crude oil reserves three times the size of Saudi Arabia's. Just never mind that turning Kerogen into fuel requires massive energy inputs -- code for greenhouse gases -- and up to 3.2 barrels of water for each barrel of shale oil.

That hasn't stopped the parched Middle Eastern country of Jordan from signing two major project agreements in the past three years. And recent reports indicate a third is coming soon.

Time for a summit on the new reality

Add up all the unconventional oil reserves in various states of development, and high-carbon fossil fuels could account for 11 per cent of global oil production by 2030, the International Energy Agency estimates.

Now would be a good time for a world summit acknowledging the corner we are turning towards higher carbon fossil fuels and discussing how to mitigate the effects through the fostering of new technologies and other policy shifts.

And what better place to hold such a gathering than British Columbia, the emerging gateway to the world for Alberta's oil sands crude? A perfect venue might be that billion dollar box with a green roof erected last year in Vancouver. [Tyee]

Geoff Dembicki reports for The Tyee with a focus on the Alberta oil sands and the fossil fuels industry.

14 Comments:

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  • Birch

    1 year ago

    If environmentalists

    are the only ones bolting awake at night, the rest of the population needs a "short, sharp shock."

    Maybe a "great fire of Los Angeles" or another Dust Bowl in North America will serve to jolt us out of our cultural stupidities. Hurricane Katrina failed. Half of the forests of BC turned into bug wood hasn't done it.

    How much of a smack in the face is it going to take to get us SERIOUSLY into diminishing our reliance on carbon?

    I suspect it can't be done. We have too much cultural inertia and too much of the population focused on trivia--ultimate fighting, NHL hockey, twitter, Q, texting--to see what's in front of our faces.

    We expect the government to pull us out of our jams, and then when they apply the necessary remedies (e.g. a carbon tax) we vote them out.

    Einstein once remarked that only two things were infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and he wasn't sure about the former.

  • RockyRacoon

    1 year ago

    How misguided. I guess now that the TAPI oil agreement has been

    signed can we admit that the only reason that we are fighting a war in the middle east is to secure oil fields for Western Use-in particular the USA? Now Canada has spent the past decade fighting a war to make this fine crude available for US Corporations and Canada is in their for another four years and they are saying it may be there permanently guarding the pipeline. In the meantime-all that money could have been spent on research and development and made the tarsands safe for production-we are paying them NOT to have to invest in the tarsands-how stupid can a country be? Not that I want all that money invested in tarsands quite the contrary but for those that do-why are you helping your competition? Makes no sense even on the most base of grounds.
    RR

  • pwlg

    1 year ago

    war in the middle east

    The war in the middle east is not to secure oil fields for western use.

    Energy consumption by two countries, China and India is forecast to grow by 118%. By 2035 these two countries will consume 30% of global energy resources.

    In contrast the US current global energy consumption at 21$ will decline to 16% by 2035.

    To US and European based oil giants it doesn't matter who you sell your wares to. It's all about money not nationalism.

  • pwlg

    1 year ago

    fluorescent vs. led

    Hopefully "new" ideas in 2011 will see more energy efficient led lighting instead of fluorescent which contains mercury. Gee, we just got rid of this stuff from our teeth, now we fill light bulbs with it.

  • Webster

    1 year ago

    Hockey cock poppy stick

    Of course we must conserve but EDITED FOR INSULTS. TYEE MODERATOR

  • marlonbrando

    1 year ago

    Global Warming

    There is no global warming.

  • Gro.Harlem.Brun...

    1 year ago

    The coming Ice age . . . scary!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsQfr7wRZsw&feature=player_embedded#!

  • Bill Darnell

    1 year ago

    energy intensive oil

    The point that is being missed is how all things interelate. If we burn two thirds of the conventional crude that has already been discovered then we will be over the 2 degrees of global warming and run away climate change will result. We should be concentrating on how to get back to 350 ppm of CO2

  • Roger Kemble

    1 year ago

    Perhaps a change in editorial policy is appropriate now . . .

    TYEE MODERATOR Sir, an "insult" that does not slander, profane or libel, may be hard on the recipient but hardly deserving of "editing-out" by a responsible public journal: unless, of course, said journal has an agenda!

    Tyee, over the last few months, has been irrevocably promoting, and wedded to, AGW despite mounting evidence by responsible scientists presenting strong evidence to the contrary: http://www.joshuaecuyer.com/2009/04/fallacy-of-man-made-global-warming.html
    indeed despite the anecdotal evidence we are currently experiencing.

    You the editor, of course, is entitled to your personal opinion but in the interests of furthering our environmental well being there is much more at stake than aTyee editor's bias.

    I believe there are very pressing problems that need our immediate attention and distracting us by obsessing over warming/cooling, that ice cores show rise and fall over millennia even without the presence of profligate human habits, is IMO not a responsible academic dialogue.

    RESPONSE FROM THE EDITORS

    A) Your posts have repeatedly violated the Tyee comments code by making libelous claims against named people, insinuations of unethical practices by Tyee editors and snide insults towards a young writer. That got your comments edited, and you blocked from further commenting under various aliases. Your tone is more measured here, but as you didn't take the hint the first several times, and refuse to acknowledge you overstepped the bounds in past posts, you are now no longer welcome commenting on this site.

    B) Your case against global warming runs contrary to the overwhelming scientific consensus and it would be a grave injustice for the Tyee to promote such destructive, midguided thinking. We won't be publishing stories that parrot such misinformation, so go elsewhere to have your views reinforced.

    TYEE EDITORS

  • morechatter

    1 year ago

    short,sharp,shock

    It isn't going to be that easy considering the damage already done so its going to take more than a short,sharp,shock to get the message out. The carbon tax is a tax taking from the poor and giving to the rich and during a recession with increased inflation the big polluters get all the breaks. Imagine giving an environmental award to someone who has made it impossible for the low income to live on their 8 dollar an hour job, and the room they can't afford while big money is getting all the tax breaks for polluting up the planet full greed ahead.
    There is no making tar sands safe for the market especially at the cost when its all about greed. Safe and greed don't mix, just like oil and water something soon forgot until the next spill takes it place.
    Expected oil spills in the New Year as there is money to be made while the average Canadians go deeper into debt while manufacturing fails to rebound is hardly a short, sharp, shock as environmential distruction continues to win hands down.

  • morechatter

    1 year ago

    Hot Topic

    http://www.climatehotmap.org/

    And why stop with blaming the Tyee for spreading nonsense all about Robert Kemble when there is a whole world you can attack. I imagine you will be so busy straightenng them all out and will not have time to come back to give us your informed opinion.
    Already the year is looking up.

  • Sask Resident

    1 year ago

    Consensus

    Consensus is important in politics and religion but has almost no meaning in science. Science done well will result in a correct answer, regardless of what everyone else thinks, believes or read in a holy book. However, the rest of the science community will be skeptical and try to prove the result as wrong thus either proving it wrong or possibly right. It only takes one person to prove a scientific theory as incorrect, regardless of how many indicate that it is right. Using the phrase "scientific consensus" is wrong and only distracts from the discussions.

  • realisticman

    1 year ago

    The New & Glorious - GREEN ECONOMY

    We should force our governments to invest in these new technologies that will turn things around.

    "Green jobs pay ten to twenty percent more and will be home grown and not outsourced."

    http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/infrastructure/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900120&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All

    We must save the planet - NOW.

    Remember baby, it's cold outside.

    http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/opinion-zone/2010/12/global-cooling-proves-global-warming-0

    We must shut down the tar sands. We MUST get this message to Michael Ignatieff that the earth is in danger before it's too late.

  • RickOshea

    1 year ago

    EROEI

    Energy Return On Energy Invested - Nichole Foss (Automatic Earth) said the EROEI for the tar sands is 1.5 - she calls it energy arbitrage.

    Our whole economy is predicated on 'cheap' plentiful energy - those days are gone and now the great unraveling begins - hold on to your hat.

    Even worse - the wheels are falling off the weather/climate wagon as well... look at the flooding in Austrailia etc. Humanity is in for a drubbing.

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