An 'Almost Infinite' Oil Resource For The U.S.?
14 November 2005 - 6:00am
Who is the largest foreign supplier of crude oil and petroleum products to the U.S.?
"It's the single largest hydrocarbon deposit on the earth, and it's next door to the biggest market for oil products, the United States. What's wrong with it?"
"Canada already quietly has surpassed Saudi Arabia as the United States' largest foreign supplier of crude oil and petroleum products...When one arrives at oil-sands operations, Alaska-like wilderness abruptly ends and heavy industry begins. Chimneys belch smoke.
Full Story:
Canada builds an oil empire on sand
Source:
San Jose Mercury News, November 10, 2005
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Fails to Mention Net Energy and Global Warming
It obviously takes much more energy to produce oil from oil sands than to produce that oil from petroleum, since you have to move two tons of earth and process the sands by boiling them to produce one barrel of oil.
This means that each barrel of oil from oil sands produces much more CO2 than a barrel of oil from petroleum. Currently, Canadian companies are required to offset this added CO2 production by investing in alternative energy; but if Canada becomes the main supplier of American gasoline, converting all of Canada's electricity to alternative energy will not be enough to offset the CO2 that oil sands operations produce.
This also means that each barrel of oil from oil sands represents much less than one barrel of net energy. The net energy equals the energy in the oil minus the energy needed to produce it. When we start thinking about net energy, we can see that this source is far from infinite.
We need analysis of these two key issues rather than the sort of puff-piece that we have in this article.
Charles Siegel