Thoughts on Oil

So lets see, its noon and I have now put in more than 40 hours work this week at the office. Luckily for me me, today I get to leave at a civilized hour, so my plan tonight is to go home, clean the house, use the Elliptical machine for a little while, then make a nice dinner and shower, read Fast Food Nation some more and go to bed early. Doesn't that sound like a great plan?

Anyway this morning I was reading in the Globe and Mail that the Saudi's think oil is too expensive. Well of course they do, at $100/barrel the World, specifically the American's are going to start taking a serious look at energy alternatives to Al Queda. I have to ask, how do you fight a "war on terror", probably better labelled as a 'war on innocent Iraqi bystander's' while you are paying for the bullets and Improvised Explosive Devices used by the 'insurgents' every time you put gas in the Hummer? But I digress, the truth of the matter is, Canada, not the Saudi Arabia is the United State's biggest smack dealer, don't believe, click the link, it's to the Energy Information Administration, Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government. Truth is, if we Canadians really wanted to help our smack junkie neighbours (and ourselves for that matter) we'd probably jack up the royalties in Alberta tar sands, then again the Government of Alberta did just that, good for them!

Lets get a little refresher on the tar sands, it is estimated that there is between 1,700 and 2,500 Billion (yes with a B) barrels of oil under the Alberta muskeg. Alberta oil producers believe they can produce 3 million barrels of oil a day by 2015, this represents, roughly 30% of total US oil imports for September 2007. Incidentally I recall from a late 90's issue of Scientific American that total conventional oil was estimated at about 2,000 billion barrels, of which we had consumed (between 1850 and 2000) about 800 billion barrels, thanks to rising demand and decreasing supply though (Hubbert Peak) we would see a steady rise in price and decline in availability starting sometime between 2000 and 2010. The Alberta muskeg just doubled the total oil on Earth.

Well lets for a moment talk nuts and bolts, to get oil from the sand you do a multi step process:

1. You clear away all the swamp, muskeg and other petty wild life, like trees wolves, deer etc from real estate just north of Fort McMurry.
2. You use HUGE machines to lift the tar sand that was under the trees and muskeg from the ground and load it on some of the largest trucks in the World. As a rule of thumb on the oil patch, you need about two tons of tar sand to make one barrel of oil.
3. You pipe tons of water through burning natural gas to make steam, you blow the steam at the tar sand and the sand precipitates out of the tar. Another rule of thumb, you need about 400 cubic feet of natural gas to separate enough tar to make a barrel of oil, 400 cubic feet of Natural Gas is enough gas to heat a reasonably large home for two days in the dead of winter.
4. You take the tar, which typically costs about $32 per barrel once you have paid off the cost of all your facilities, and you upgrade or crack the tar molecules into little molecules of synthetic crude oil.
5. You sell your synthetic crude oil, as long as you get $40 a barrel or more you've made money. (After recovering cost of multi-billion dollar facility.)
6. You repeat this process something like 300 thousand to 3 million times per day.

And to think, some Canadian's think most green house gases come from Ontario! Actually the part I really like from that article: Surprisingly, very few placed major responsibility on wasteful consumers (5 per cent), rich people (4 per cent), those who drive SUVs or other big cars (3 per cent) or live in Alberta (1 per cent). Well I don't have a problem with rich people or people who live in Alberta, but really was the Toyota FJ Cruiser really the most sensible vehicle available?