Rhinocrisy

Though at this one, we’ll drink vermouth and make wry, incisive comments about why the world is crumbling. Anyway, read his post about the Sept. 24 anti-war rally in D.C., where he does some ANSWER-bashing. The performance seems to have been about what I expected: every damn issue thrown together and blended at high velocity into a rather unappetizing frappe of Left-ish causes.

A Tiny Revolution is having a slogan contest for the Democratic Party. Go to it!

Lately I’ve been getting annoyed by bituminous tar sands. This, I’ll grant, makes me “not normal”, but it seems like every time someone mentions peak oil, some Doubting Thomas trots out the vast, relatively untapped deposits of oil sands that will save us from our bleak future. I think this is bollocks, and that optimism is wholly misplaced.

There’s a whole host of reasons why this is true. There’s essentially two mega-fantastico deposits of oil sands in the world, in Alberta, Canada (the Athabasca sands) and Venezuela (the Orinoco belt). These are huge deposits: the figures quoted are on the order of trillions of barrels for each. That’s enough oil to last us for centuries. But I don’t think it will ever be produced.

A few years ago Canada decided to include oil sands in their reserve estimates, and ever since then there’s been growing excitement about the coming boom, with Canada being compared favorably to Saudi Arabia. Despite that, relatively little oil is actually forthcoming so far: only about a million barrels per day. The Kingdom, meanwhile, produces 9 Mbd, and claims to be able to produce 11.5 Mbd.

There’s two ways of getting oil from oil sands: The “easy” method, the one mostly employed now, is essentially a mining operation. You mine the oil sands out of the ground, just like you would mine coal or bauxite or whatever. Then you cart it away in trucks to your processing facility, wash the oil out from the sand, do some post-processing, and send it off to market. The harder method is “in-situ” production, which works basically like a lot of modern late-stage conventional crude operations: you pump hot steam into the ground, which displaces and loosens up bitumen, which you suck up out of the ground and process, etc.

This latter method will be more critical in the future, as the vast majority of the oil sands in Canada are not accessible via mining methods: they’re too deep underground. Mining operations require a lot of water, but it can be recycled (mostly - the untreatable water is put into a holding lake. Syncrude’s is currently 4.5 miles in diameter). In-situ methods mean losing the water, at about a one-to-one ratio with recovered oil. In other words, if you want to produce 9 Mbd of oil, you have to pump 9 Mbd of water into the ground. By comparison, the flow rate of the Athabasca river varies between 2.5 Bbd and 40 Mbd. That water is permanently removed from the hydrological cycle.

Let’s pretend we don’t care about that, or the other horrendous environmental effects associated with this operation, as with any other mining operation: let’s pretend we’re willing to dessicate the aquifer and it won’t end up being prohibitive to production. We’re still stuck with the problem of natural gas. In order to get bitumen up to snuff, it’s necessary to add hydrogen, to get the higher grade of fuel needed for jets, automobiles, etc. This requires gas inputs (as do other parts of the process e.g. heating water for steam injection). Right now, gas inputs for hydrogen upgrading alone amount to 400 cubic feet; some day, in order to produce high quality fuel this may reach as high as 1700 cubic feet. 5487 cubic feet of gas is considered to be one barrel of oil equivalent. That’s a significant energy input, merely to upgrade bitumen to the standard necessary for high quality fuels.

Let me quote Alan Greenspan from his testimony before the House in 2003:

Because gas is particularly challenging to transport in its cryogenic form as a liquid, imports of LNG have been negligible. Environmental and safety concerns and cost have limited the number of LNG terminals and imports of LNG. In 2001, LNG imports accounted for only 1 percent of U.S. gas supply. Canada, which has recently supplied a sixth of our consumption, has little capacity to significantly expand its exports, in part because of the role that Canadian gas plays in supporting growing oil production from tar sands.

I.e., Canada (like everyone else) is strapped for gas. It’s going to be difficult for them to match the demands of their burgeoning oil sands industry. Especially when you consider that Canadian gas production is due to peak in only a few short years - after that, oil sands will very quickly (in on the order of ten years from now) become completely unsustainable if they continue to rely on natural gas.

So - gas requirements, water requirements, general environmental devastation. What else can we add to the mix? How about - CO₂? Since producing tar sands is so fuel-intensive, there’s a much higher burden on the production of greenhouse gases. This is the last thing the world needs right now, and this is certainly going to become difficult for Canada as things like Kyoto actually start to get some teeth.

The most optimistic scenarios for Canadian oil sands project them being able to produce 5 Mbd by 2030. The National Energy Board of Canada has a more conservative 3 Mbd. I think this is reasonable, and underscores what Colin Campbell has to say about the subject: “The key point about tar sands is that the resource is huge but the extraction rate is very low.”

So don’t hold your breath.

that Delay would have been indicted if Houston hadn’t just become one of the poster children of Republican mismanagement? Poor guy might be a victim of nature’s fury. Awwww.

Billmon asks what a rational energy and transportation policy would look like.

About 90% of oil goes to transportation; about 40% of primary energy in the U.S. So energy and transportation are largely one and the same. For both, start with land use. It’s the huge, easy-to-pick fruit that is just hanging there, waiting for hands to pluck it.

That is: We need dense, walkable neighborhoods in every city and town. New development should be in the form of walkable neighborhoods clustered around existing intersections and roads. We should cease all road expansion and put all dediated transportation funds into reviving or creating a rail and bus infrastructure. But mostly, our transportation problems are not the result of too little transportation, but too much. We need to create communities where people can live without cars, or with fewer cars, and where they can choose to drive but can also choose not to drive.

The example of the Rita and Katrina “evacuations” — compared to the smooth, successful, and incredibly speedy NYC evacuation by transit, foot, and private vessel on 9/11/01 — should show that a new development paradigm is not just a matter of efficiency, but also safety.

So how does this play out in policy? Transportation dollars should be handed over to local jurisdictions, who should be allowed to use them to subsidize transit operations as they see fit. Current rules governing “level of service” (aka vehicle delay) and “planning” (aka project current trends in a straight line into the future) should be abandoned. Bicycle and pedestrian safety should be the paramount concern on every path, road, and highway, far above vehicle driver safety. These are all no-cost policy changes.

Meanwhile, it’s time to start taxing imports to monetize the destruction they wreak on local manufacturing and on generations of folk wisdom about such necessities as how to make shoes. This is the kind of stuff we need if we are to survive the end of oil — we need to subsidize our cobblers or tax imports to the point that going to a local cobbler makes sense.

And no, this is not bad for the exporting countries. The last thing they need is to go into debt turning their countries into sweatshops. Vietnam will gradually become a ghost town as oil gets pricey enough to make domestic production more profitable than shipping goods 10,000 miles. Better for them to develop an economy of domestic production for domestic consumption, the post-WW II India model. It’s that or a catastrophic future collapse.

Why does this remind me of those guys who want so badly to convince you they’re straight, lifting weights all the time and keeping their hair trimmed all cute-like?

Red state newspaper looking for like-minded
journalist
Location: Greensboro, North Carolina
Job Status: Full-time
Website: http://rhinotimes.com
Description:
The Rhinoceros Times, a family-owned conservative weekly in Greensboro, NC, is looking for a full-time reporter. We expect reporters to write lengthy, well-researched stories.

Funny how you never see liberals applying this sort of political litmus test. Go figure.