Another Tar Sands "Black eye"!

We may wonder what the environmental impact is of the proposed pipeline. This is one area the environmental community in the US can try to change how oil sands are processed.

Senators Question Secretary of State Clinton's Comments on Oil Sands Pipeline - NYTimes.com

My little canadian joke about friend and buddy didn't seem to go over well.

The process being used to produce synthetic oil from the oil sands is ecologically awful. This does not mean that these sands can not be processed in a more environmental way. The big problems are not with carbon dioxide, but other polutants. Carbon dioxide is increased but the bulk of it is produced when the oil is burned not when it is produced.

Calling the bituminous sands "tar" sands does not aid in the understanding of the process. There is no tar, it just looks like tar. The process currently being used is an environmentally hazardous one as the strip mining and processing are not being done in a way to protect the environment. The term "tar sand" is in common usage but like the name Indian it does not really add to the understanding of the native American tribes it has been used to label. My comment was partially sarcastic because to me your correction was to tell me to not call someone a Navajo but an Indian, as Navajo is the wrong word and Indian is so much more meaningful.

 

I'll try to put it in more of the form I think of these things, so to help explain my point of view. Oil has various grades, from light to heavy and from sweet to sour. The heavier and more sour the more energy is needed to make it into the petroleum products we use. West texas intermediate is a light sweet crude, requirement the least amount of energy. Alaska North slope has a heavy crude that requires a great deal more energy. Bitumen is so heavy that other lighter hydrocarbons are needed to make if flow, and the Alberta fields are very sour.

Now if you are going to cut off all the oil that is not light and sweet from US hands, the price differential will rise. We will probably also stop refining Alaskan oil soon. Not much of a impact will happen on the use of these oils as they will be used in china and japan. The us will just shift use to Persian gulf oil, but the net affect on world carbon dioxide use will not be affected. Taking a 30 year perspective, the US foreign policy will get more drastically affected by mid east politics as it will have cut itself off from much of the world's production as fields get heavier and more sour.

Only reducing global oil demand, not restricting US sources of oil will reduce the pollution from heavier and more sour oil sources.

Hey call it by what you want. The pollution doesn't change. Your understanding of refining does suffer though. It is not about sanitizing the language. If we could as easily produce synthetic oil from coal tar, as the namers first incorrectly identified the source, then carter's coal gasification program might have worked. It's much tougher and more expensive to turn tar into gasoline. The federal budget still has huge boondoggle funds to try and do this with US coal resources. The people that wrote those spending bills probably didn't understand much about energy either.

 

Austin: You mention some terms we hear all the time, and one I've not heard before, when describing crude oil: Light, heavy, sweet, and sour.

I imagine that light and heavy are self-explanatory. I suppose light oil is thinner, flows easier, and heavy is thicker, flows more slowly.

But what do "sweet" and "sour" mean when speaking of crude oil?

Thanks.

 

Very interesting. Thanks, Icarus.

 

That is a good link, thanks icarus, I may reuse it.

One thing to note about sour oil. The sulfur is removed with hydrogen. This hydrogen is usually generated by using part of the energy of the oil, or from natural gas. If a pipeline is built to Texas as proposed the carbon dioxide generated will not change, but is much higher than better grades of oil. Because of cap and trade on SOx and NOx the refiners will buy credits from utilities, and texas refineries will produce more of these pollutants but these will be offset by lower levels being produced elsewhere in the united states. If the products are refined in china it will likely increase SOx and NOx in china as there is no current capping mechanism.

Bottom line on oil sands productions is it is being done in a very environmentally unsound way, and I am against the pipeline unless more environmental protection is given. BP already had incidents with the leaky alaskan pipeline. In my local community we have tried to stop the longhorn pipeline which is an old leaky pipeline going through some environmentally sensitive areas, and the federal government has blocked us stating interstate commerce giving Texas citizens no rights. If the federal government allows the pipeline, I doubt environmental groups in Nebraska will be able to fight it.

 

Also of interest:

Coal can also be "sour". We are running out of the "sweet" stuff as well. Most of the low sulfur coal is found in the west. The coal in midwest is relatively sour and burning that stuff while keeping emissions low requires expensive emissions retrofits.

 

I would expect that it would even be more expensive. Then again shell was making over $20/bbl in 2006 on the oil sands. There is plenty of money chasing the resource. It would be nice if alberta slowed down, and built the environmental protection in, but I doubt that will happen.

The problem is many can't drive on electricity right now. That needs to change. I don't think solar would work around the fields, but wind could be used instead of natural gas for much of the energy needed to process the sands. This natural gas could be used in vehicles.... That would be a net energy gainer. Wind pays for itself in texas, solar or wind in much of north America.

That money week article was way short on fact checking. Here are a couple. There is twice as much unconventional oil in oil sands as there are in current estimates of conventional reserves. About half of canada's oil production is from oil sands. It exports more than half of its production to the united states. Conventional canadian reserves are in decline. There are much more environmentally safe techniques that can be developed and many are being developed now.

Canada and the US need to produce more renewable energy. Even with wind and solar though the world is going to keep burning oil. PHEVs and BEVs can be part of the solution to reduce the amount, but given enough years unconventional reserves are going to be tapped. I just hope that the speed of development can be slowed and the oil sand and oil shale can be produced in a more environmentally sound manner. There is plenty of money in the production right now that could be used to do this, instead it is going to the oil companies and some government offices.

 

Here is the problem. Alberta government offices are making money and so are the oil companies.

Even this article makes clear why investment will continue to flow. Alberta is not charging for dead birds or fish or polluted water so California teachers pensions are heavily invested in those polluting oil companies, that are "investing" the money to strip mine. You don't see them buying the green stocks like me
Oil sands production could carry risk for investors | Greenspace | Los Angeles Times

What are the odds that when the fields are producing 4million bbls a day in 2025 that oil is bellow $65/bbl? Most oil companies are betting higher.

 

Many are projecting prices well over $100/barrel by 2012...

I am glad I am getting my electric car soon.

 

The reason this excellent idea will not happen is capitalism: Remember the old line: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime." Well, capitalism sees it differently: "Sell a man a fish and you make a day's profit; teach him to fish and you lose a customer."

A quarter of a trillion dollars invested in tar sands (or whatever we're supposed to call the stuff) produces gasoline the investors can sell; the same money invested in PV on peoples' roofs makes those people energy independent and the companies lose all their customers. So investors won't provide the capital.

The oil companies are so powerful, that legislators won't spend public money on the PV project, for fear of losing campaign contributions, because legislators (of both parties) are more concerned about getting reelected than about the welfare of the country.

And with a very few exceptions (some on this chat board) people will not borrow money to buy their own PVs because they're too brainwashed from spending all their leisure time in front of the goddamn television. And anyway, right now the banks aren't lending, and by the time the economy recovers (if it ever does under the weight of rising oil costs!) we'll have lost a few more years and slid farther down into the hole.

So, it's a great idea, even an obvious idea, but our economic and political system won't let it happen.

 

grp. huh. Sociallist and communist states have more polution than capitalist states. The reason the magic money bag doesn't buy wind turbines and solar panels is there is not a magic money bag. Pension money is heavily invested in big oil, and big oil money is putting the money toward exploiting the oil sands. Renewable energy can be a good investment, but this requires government incentives. In Alberta the incentives are all in favor of pollution and rapid development of the resource. Now the government of canada could use some of that oil revenue to create incentives for green power, but that is quite a different problem.

I expect that the weak dollar policy at the fed will push the price of oil up. My likely scenario is $500 billion invested. The oil companies also have additional money allocated on the side just in case canada makes them clean up the environmental mess. In Nigeria, where the US gets a great deal of oil, leaky pipelines have created even more enviromental problems. The Nigerian government looks the other way, as the Canadian government is now doing. Oil companies are not preventing renewable energy, often they make money on that too. The government incentives and subsidies favor pollution, so the oil companies are investing in what the governments want. Now the oil companies also get the best government their money can buy, so its a two way street.

In texas where many of the oil comanies operate, there are strong government incentives and a rapidly growing renewable energy infrastructure. We also have horses as*** that are apologists for the oil companies. Texas would actually make bp more accountable for the disasterous texas city refinery, but it is under EPA control. The politicians here understand renewable energy is part of the future. More wind means less natural gas used, and we can sell it to california or other states. Blame bad politicians they have the control.

My local utility will get people low interest loans for PV and energy saving enhancements. Many utilities are the same. These are regulated bodies and regulation should incentivise the power companies to do the right thing. In unceratain economic times though, taking on debt for home improvement is a difficult choice. I hope when the economy improves more families add PVs to their homes.

 

i agree with daniel so goes the reason why other countries willl progress towards an energy independent future much quicker than we will despite having much less resources, much greater need and starting at a point that is literally 30 years in the past.

in China, capitalism does not have the same stronghold at least not within the country, so the government controls most of the policy concerning long term decisions.

here, we are hampered by people who only want to make the money and get out knowing that no matter how badly we are, they will not really see the drawbacks of their actions in their lifetime. its sad to see people who have an utter lack of concern over the future of their children or the world we live in

 

There aren't any socialist or communist states. The Soviet Union was a capitalist country where the government owned all the capital, run by a political party that named itself "Communist" but in fact ran the government very much like Czarist Russia, but with strong social safety nets. Party functionaries got rewarded or punished based on production figures, just as execs in American companies get rewarded for showing profits.

Socialism is what happens when the workers own the factories, and communism is a utopian dream where there is no government ("the withering away of the state," in Marx's terms) and no money and everybody just works as s/he is able, and takes only what s/he needs. Communism is not possible and nobody has tried socialism yet.