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TechnoratiCanada's Tar Sands Are the Future of Oil Production: Oil Exec.
MONTREAL - The era of oil gushing from ground wells is over and can only be replaced by costly and complex refining of deposits such as Canada's oil sands to satisfy rising global energy needs, said a senior oil executive.
![[The Syncrude extraction facility in the northern Alberta oil sand fields is reflected in the pool of water being recycled for re-use in the extraction process in Fort McMurray, Canada in 2007. (AFP/File/David Boily)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/oilexec_futureistarsands.jpg "oilexec_futureistarsands.jpg")
Pressed about the high cost of oil sands extraction and attacks by environmentalists worried about its contribution to global warming, Jean-Michel Gires, president of French-based Total's Canadian subsidiary, told AFP he is optimistic specifically about the future of Canada's oil sands development.
"These are ambitious projects, very big projects, and thus very expensive," he said in a telephone interview from Calgary, Alberta -- Canada's oil capital.
"It's clear that cost is a problem," he conceded. "But it's also an important deposit -- several billion barrels of oil in the ground -- while more conventional sources of oil that would be relatively easier to extract are either drying up or are inaccessible to international firms such as Total."
"The price of energy is not going to collapse," despite downward pressure from a spiralling global economy, Gires predicts.
"To justify our massive investments in the oil sands, we're looking at what the world will look like in 2020, 2025 or 2030," he said.
"In the long run, despite all of the efforts to boost energy efficiency and develop alternative energy sources, the planet's appetite for energy ... will mean additional oil production will be welcomed and we'll find buyers for our output."
It is this long-term outlook that preoccupies Total Canada, as it develops its Joslyn mine in Western Canada's Athabasca Valley, hoping to start producing its first 100,000 barrels of oil per day by 2017-2018.
Its Northern Lights project to the north, however, "will not be ready to start producing until after 2020," Gires noted.
Total has also partnered with Conoco Phillips on the Surmont mine using a new technology to extract oil from the bitumen by injecting steam into the ground to heat the oil and reduce its viscosity, causing it to drain into a drilled well from which it is pumped out.
It is called steam assisted gravity drainage, and requires a much smaller initial investment than mining the oil sands and carting it away in huge trucks to processing facilities.
Such mines must produce at least 100,000 barrels of oil per day to be profitable as start-up costs are enormous, rising up to 10 billion Canadian dollars (9.5 billion US).
But the SAGD method can be applied for less than 30,000 barrels of oil per day and requires a mere two billion dollars (1.9 billion US) to set up.
For now, the Surmont mine is producing only 20,000 barrels of oil per day, but Total hopes to boost it to 100,000 barrels per day by 2015.
"We must choose the best technology for all of these projects. We need to be mindful of the environment, CO2 emissions, water, rehabilitation of sites afterwards, and make it work within our budget," Gires said.
"There are federal and provincial regulations that we must follow," he noted. "All of that causes a certain delay in getting projects off the ground."
The company is also constructing an oil "upgrader" on the outskirts of Edmonton, the capital of Alberta province.
And a vast source of energy to make it all work in Canada's desolate prairies is still required. Some had proposed building a nuclear plant, but Gires dismissed this for "technical and economic reasons."
More likely, he said, the industry would continue tapping into the province's abundant and cheap natural gas to fuel oil sands development.
16 Comments so far
Show AllAs GwNorth correctly points out, it is the demand, not the supply, that is the essence of the problem. Most of the fossil fuel "solutions" being proposed today do not address the fact that the auto and sprawl are heavily subsidized, and are extremely wasteful of energy. To turn this ship around, implement free public transit in your city, and gradually undercut the power of the private-auto system.
http://fptcananda.blogspot.com
Jean-Michel Gires, speaking for Total (and many others, as well) clearly doesn't live on planet earth.
The tar sands are simply NOT going to be developed, because of the unacceptable environmental holocaust they represent. Gires and people like him are unable to grasp this simple fact. It appears to be beyond the tiny imaginations of these hydrocarbon business-as-usual dwarves to realize that the killer CO2 emissions make the project unrealizable.
Business-as-usual is NO longer an option, as they will surely soon be made to understand. One way or the other.
The fact that tar sands development serves no useful purpose for the Canadian public should make it even easier to rally the support and understanding necessary to stamp out business-as-usual.
Who knows? There's even a chance in the future that Canadians themselves might well find a use for their last remaining supplies of relatively clean natural gas. In any case it is idiotic to sacrifice our natural gas to cook the oil out of the tar sands for the USA. Not to mention the vast water resources that will be destroyed by these senseless projects at no cost to the perpetrators. These are truly crimes against the public interest of all Canadians.
We must organize and educate to stop this madness. Venceremos!
According to Wikipedia the Athabaska oil sands could produce 170 billion barrels of oil even at 2006 prices. At higher prices the economically recoverable oil would be much greater. This is much more than the 'several billion barrels of oil in the ground' mentioned in this article. In fact, there are estimated to be 1.7 trillion barrels in the ground and the amount recoverable would depend on what price people would be willing to pay. Currently, even in this recession, the world uses more than 30 billion barrels of oil each year. So, the Athabaska sands could supply the world for possibly a decade or the USA for several decades. As we pass peak oil, these sands will be exploited regardless of the environmental costs. I am not advocating the extraction of this oil. I am just being pragmatic about what is likely to occur.
Just a further word on this.
My family moved to Ft Macmurray when I was 14 years old my father getting a job at what was then called Great Canadian Oil sands or GCOS.
Prior to that we did not have running water. We got our phone installed when i was 12. We lived in a farmhouse that was so cold in winter frost would appear on the insides of the wall and the Jug from which we got our water would be frozen over wherein we had to break the ice to get a drink of water in the morning.
Now just imagine a lifestime of struggle as my Father and mother went through. My Mother was in fact born in a sod hut her father had built when he emigrated to Canada. She went to grade 8 before she was pulled back to work the farm. My father was forced out of school at the age of 6 to do the same and would harrow fields behind teams of horses.
When they got married the first place they lived in was a converted granary which a tornado took away.
After some 20 years marriage Dad then gets that job and EVERYTHING changes. For the first time they have money with which they can buy THINGS that so many took for granted such as NEW clothes for their children rather then have them wear hand me downs.
This is a huge change and it hard for people suddenly thrust into making a decent income to believe that it wrong.
When I first went up there the land was pristine. I would go canoeing or rafting down rivers. I would walk a few miles from town and be in forests which rarely in their history had seen the prescence of men. There were lakes that we could not even get to save by plane or canoe in which the hook of a fisherman had never been dropped. I caught a Pike that was 36 inches long off the shore in one of these lakes.
It is all going to ruin now. Where GCOS was one small plant there are dozens and more of the same EXPONENTIALLY larger.
Herein is my moral conumdrum.
I personally benfitted off the mining of the TAR sands through my fathers and mothers jobs there those jobs having lifted them from what was in essence a lifetime of struggle and poverty.
I recognize the devastating impact the mining of those Tar sands has on the enviroment.
How can I in good conscience demand they be closed down and all those people working there see their incomes slashed these same peole having lived lives of struggle in places liek Newfoundland or indeed India, Somalia or China (it a town of people that come from the world over)
Much of the land that the tar sands are located on are lands owned by Six Nations Peoples. The Six Nations Peoples object and resist having their lands stolen by the Canadian government and oil companies. The Six Nations Peoples too live in great poverty. Now, their only source of existence, their land, is being illegally taken from them and ruined. How will these people survive? The short answer is, they will not. Pure and simple, this is continued genocide. WTF?
WRONG. Please get your facts correct.
The Six nations are in Ontario and Quebec. The lands where these plants operate are in areas legally surrendered by other first nations tribes.
The SIX nations have nothing to do with the Athabasca tar sands. They are located several THOUSAND miles away.
The tribes in this region are NOT Iroguois or Mohawk or any tribal claim even CLOSE to the six nations.
The natives in the region we speak of signed Treaty 8. The Six nations are WAY over in the East signing treaties RH and covered under the proclamtion of 1763.
The natives in the Tar sand regions are Cree, Beaver and Chippewyan.
The Distance between this latter group and the peoples of the 6 nations is greater then the distance between Paris France and Warsaw, Your claims are like suggesting the French see their "lands Violated" when Russia moves on Chechnya.
What most Americans do not know, Hyperion, a Canadian Company doesn't want the pollution and ruination of good land, either. That is why they have contracted to ship shale oil in its natural condition to southeast South Dakota, about five miles from where I live. They want to build a huge refinery and have bought up some 3200+ acres for their filthy work. They will use, get this, 12,000,000 gallons of Missouri River water EVERY day. They claim they will return it to the river in pure condition. Sure they will. The farms in this area are very fertile, but will certainly suffer from the infiltration of some 4,000+ field workers, most of whom will prey on South Dakota's small number of beautiful girls and get drunk and fight in the gorgeous college town (University of So. Dakota) every night.
Why do they not process this mess in Canada? Because they know the damage it will cost and they don't want it done in Canada. So, South Dakota, a state of only 600,000, thinks they have a bonanza. What they have is a mess that will mar those many acres for ages to come.
I say, if they want to produce the oil in Canada, go ahead. It will save piping the oil and its shale all the way to the Iowa-South Dakota line, but it is worth the cost to them to avoid the tragedy that will result from this filthy work.
It is the United States of America that wants that oil.
Now Imagine a nation of dug addicts buying Cocaine and heroin form the world over and insisting that OTHER nations bear the social costs.
Use another example, that of forests. Vast swathes of Indonesia are being logged to grow palm oil and or to EXPORT hardwood lumbers to places that demand such. Wherein lies the root cause of the problem? That people DEMAND those products or that people supply the same?
Now as a Canadian I am opposed to the expansion of Tar sands activities. I feel the destruction being wrought on the enviroment outweighs any benefits gained. At the same time thae United States of America will be consuming a good portion of the Oil being extracted from the same. The consumer of a product can not demand the supplier bear all the enviromental costs.
In other words if you want to CONSUME this product and insist other nations provide it to you it not ETHICAL to demand the supplier bear all the enviromental costs. If you think the enviromental costs outweigh the benefits, then stop consuming oil.
The reason Poppies are the largest cash crop in Afghanistan is NOT because the people there grow poppies , it is because the people in the west DEMAND that product and will pay cash for it.
If the tar sands are the future of Big Oil, we can kiss goodbye to whatever little of the planet is left. Those things are one of the most environmentally distructive brain farts these greedy bastards could have ever come up with.
There is no need for the Americans to invade. Successive US-Friendly Canadian governments have all but sold Canada to those vampires to the south.
from the article:
"And a vast source of energy to make it all work in Canada's desolate prairies is still required. Some had proposed building a nuclear plant, but Gires dismissed this for "technical and economic reasons."
More likely, he said, the industry would continue tapping into the province's abundant and cheap natural gas to fuel oil sands development."
Obvious answer...tiny nuke reactors built right into cars...sorta like the 'hot' trunk in Repo Man...
How long until the USA accuses Canada of having WMD and invading?
Or maybe they will use the excuse of saving the French from Canadian oppression...then they can dust off the old "freedom fries" again
or the womans liberation angle..."in the winter, they make their women dress from head to toe in a "snow burka"
There is no need for that.
Most of the Tar-Sands is already owned by American companies.
An image of tar sand oil extraction... the most destructive 'technology' of all.
http://www.blog.thesietch.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/oil_sands_open_pit_mining.jpg
These oil execs have no regard for their childrens' right to an intact and natural environment whatsoever.
American consumers and businesses already spend roughly $700 billion to $1 trillion each year on coal, oil and natural gas, and suffer the incalculable costs of pollution from fossil fuels through damage to our health and environment. Imported oil sends billions of our dollars to other countries - some to countries hostile to the interests of the U.S. Those billions could be better spent here at home, creating the new business investments and new jobs, saving money for families who could spend it on health care, education, and other basic needs.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, transitioning to a clean energy economy could cut global warming emissions while saving consumers and businesses $465 billion each year by 2030, with $1.7 trillion in net cumulative savings between 2010 and 2030. Sen. Snowe and Sen. Collins do what’s right for Maine and take action to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels by supporting climate legislation.
What follows is an aroundabout admission that Peak Oil is here and represents a big challenge. Related to this is a recent item at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5944 showing how and why oil price will remain high regardless of increasing energy efficiency in OECD countries. So, even as the US economy continues to tank, we will NOT see the usual dropoff in energy prices that are "normative" to a recession. For example, in previous recessions, gas would be around 1.50/gal, not edging closer to $3. Now with the ongoing decline in dollar value/purchasing power, we have the slack in demand from OECD countries picked-up by the dynamic non-OECD economies. The USA can look forward to continuing inflation in energy and energy-dependent products, while facing continuing deflation in housing and continually lowering living standards thanks to the great structural defects in its economy.
"These are ambitious projects, very big projects, and thus very expensive," he said in a telephone interview from Calgary, Alberta -- Canada's oil capital.
"It's clear that cost is a problem," he conceded. "But it's also an important deposit -- several billion barrels of oil in the ground -- while more conventional sources of oil that would be relatively easier to extract are either drying up or are inaccessible to international firms such as Total."
"The price of energy is not going to collapse," despite downward pressure from a spiralling global economy, Gires predicts.
"To justify our massive investments in the oil sands, we're looking at what the world will look like in 2020, 2025 or 2030," he said.
"In the long run, despite all of the efforts to boost energy efficiency and develop alternative energy sources, the planet's appetite for energy ... will mean additional oil production will be welcomed and we'll find buyers for our output."