Don't Muck Around With Oil Sands

Canada is experiencing a mini-gold rush of multinational companies looking to develop projects around the Alberta tar sands. In the midst of the seventies oil crisis, one of my research groups did a lot of work on the Athabasca River tar sands, but not much development work came of it. There's no doubt that production from oil sands has become important for U.S. oil imports from Canada, but it's a questionable resource to be focusing on for environmental and economic reasons.

The Athabasca River deposits are bitumen deposits. The easiest way to think about this is to go out to an asphalt driveway and imagine that it were hot enough to melt the asphalt into a thick sludge. Now imagine mining, handling and processing this sludge for light and middle distillate products that industry and consumers need, like jet fuels, lubricants, and gasoline. The mining operations used to be strip mining, although it has moved away from that somewhat. The level and scale of the equipment is truly mind boggling. The energy input and the water requirements are enormous. The main reason these resources are garnering the attention is the relatively relaxed governmental regulatory structure in Canada versus places like Russia, West Africa, and the Middle East where more easily exploitable resources exist.

Using 2000 data, the global output of carbon into the environment was about 6.2 GtC/year, of which 1.7 GtC/year came from worldwide coal plants burning low grade coal at 32% efficiency. (Pacala & Socolow in Science) Increasing the efficiency of coal plants or, better still, switching to gas-fired base capacity can contribute one "stabilization wedge" to reducing the path of carbon emission, and one wedge is worth 1 GtC/year. This kind of project is eminently doable and gas is now plentiful in high quality resources. Building pipeline infrastructures would create demand for materials and jobs. The nuclear portfolio should also increase as the per kWh costs decline as plant designs are standardized and become more modular. In fact, the Chinese government's largest utility in Hong Kong has just announced such a plan to switch its electricity generation capacity away from coal and towards nuclear and natural gas. If China, as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide from burning coal, is thinking about this kind of future, why is America not doing so? And we chastise others for lagging on environmental issues?

A multi-fuel, portfolio approach using high quality fuels that can produce what consumers want is the way to go. Mucking around with heavy oil sands is not a sensible proposition.