Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
There are big problems with the oil sands - it's a mistake to think of them in the same context as conventional drilled oil.
Firstly, you have to massacre the environment to dig this stuff up (it's buried underground) and then create huge amounts of waste to extract the oil from the bitumen sands. Not good at all and obviously requires much more energy to recover than conventional oil.
Therefore, it partially offsets the peak - but isn't going to make it go away.
Anybody have exact figures to hand on actual oil sand production rates and costs?
Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2004 9:56 am Post subject: cost
Oil Sands are more expensive to extract and use than conventional crude.
Peak theory says oil will be more expensive, not unavailable. _________________ "When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F Roberts.
Low Energy Profit Ratio (About 1.5, compared to oil - which has been as high as 100 and is currently around 10 depending on its source)
Low Rate of Extraction.
Think about it this way:
You're in the desert. YOu're dying of thirst. You come across a huge well of water. "Wow, I'm saved" you exclaim.
Then you realize that the well will only pump out a drop at a time. And it takes so much effort to pump out that your losing as much in sweat as you are getting water from the pump.
Actually, that NatGeo article for this month goes into the tar sands issue quite nicely. One point they make is that it takes 4000 Lbs. of sand to extract one barrel of oil. The process itself has several steps including heating the sand/water slurry they create to over 500 deg.F; they point out that there's even talk of putting a nuclear reactor in the middle of all the current activity up there to provide the necessary heat and a ready supply of hot (temp - not radioactivity ) water. What comes out is supposed to be pretty much perfect light,sweet crude and they do have the cost of processing down to $10/bl so it is clearly profitable now (and more so as NYMEX price goes up, up, up.) But the other products of the processing are grey sand that has to be returned to the stripmined area (grab the magazine for a great shot of a very ugly refilled hole from past processing) and some water that no one would want to drink.
Of course, the most important point they make is - at best - they hope to get a few MBD at full production. So this might replace Kuwait or Yemen but it's not a new Saudi Arabia perched right next to the Best Oil Customer Ever. It should help Canada's economy for many years to come but production will never be high enough to satisfy more than a small percentage of the US's daily need. But, hey, every little bit helps, right?
Joined: May 24, 2004 Posts: 1938 Location: Richland Center, Wisconsin
Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2004 12:00 pm Post subject: Ratios
Quoting myself from another board:
Self @ EHS-Net wrote:
As for new energy technology, I see three issues:
1) Transitioning from conventional to alternative
2) Greenhouse Gas (GHG) production
3) Useful-Energy-Out :: Reserve-Energy-In must be > 1.
And, as I wrestle with this issue more, perhaps a fourth: "What endpoint will we logically arrive at if we keep finding and using up ever more energy sources?" The more I look at myself coming to grips with this, the more I see myself having 'divided mind syndrome'. One side says "Go team! Keep my life just like it is for another 50 years." and the other says "What miracle gives the Earth the ability to keep supporting an exponentially growing population of ever-more-consuming critters?" And then, a higher aspect weighs in and says "even that which is not the Tao, is the Tao." The bottom line for me is that there is no easy and comfortable path through this, although liberal amounts of mental and psychological preparation beforehand may make the journey less treacherous.
_________________ --------------------------------
| Whose reality is this anyway!? |
--------------------------------
(-------< Temet Nosce >-------)
____________________________
To build on what Matt said about the poor ratio of energy-in to energy-out.
The article I mentioned has more pretty pictures. One is of the director of one of the energy companies involved in Alberta. He's standing in the scoop of one of the excavating machines used to dig out the sand. And I do mean standing - with the teeth of this huge steam shovel's scoop flat on the ground, he's standing on the toothed edge of the scoop while the opposite side is clearly several inches above his head. I doubt the man shown is less than two meters tall.
Even more impressive is the shot of one of the strip mines where there are several earth movers trundling about to be filled or taking sand off for processing. The analogy they give is that one of these machine is big enough to haul a mini-mansion. If you've never seen one, it is to a normal dump truck as an aircraft carrier is to dinghy. Fuel efficient? Not hardly. Nor are those big excavators that fill them.
So the point is, even before processing, you've burnt up A LOT of diesel getting the sand out of the ground and delivered to the purification plant. After the processing, you'll need more diesel to get the waste sand back to old holes. And, yeah, there is that annoying processing part in the middle that will need a (substantial) bit of fuel. It's still a net positive (unlike hydrogen but that's another problem) but, as always, there's no free lunch.
Joined: May 22, 2004 Posts: 1438 Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2004 12:46 pm Post subject:
Well I think alot of the newer projects use Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage and therefore do not require massive trucks and scoops or the awful strip minning. On the other hand I believe the wells are very closely spaced together so it isn't like the area is going to ever seem pristine again. Perhaps someone with more experience on this can chime in.
My personal prediction is that while there are alot of projects ramping up in the area, there will not be an exponential increase in production. They already are bumping up against experienced manpower issues. Fort McMurray is along way from anywhere. And the nights are really long. Not everyone can take it even if the pay is really good.(This comes from an ex-roommate in college I've no personal experience) Another issue is that they may come up against are resourse concerns that are hard to solve such as lack of water, severe air polution.
To get to the level of a saudi arabia from the tar sands it would take astronomical amounts of investment. When and if oil gets seriously expensive that may be feasible ( and great for Canada's economy) but it can't be done quickly, the industry has to grow to be able to usefully use that money.
I agree completely with respect to those who realize that the Alberta tar sands will never make up for the future Middle East production decline. Too expensive, too slow, barely passable EROEI.
Further to the EROEI of available fuels, one of the most useful posts that the "nuclear-happy" fellow at the ER board demonstrated was how EROEI is misunderstood. Cheap oil at 100 to 1 versus 50 to 1 would seem to be a significant difference. It's not, really. At 100 to 1, your net gain in oil is 99 barrels. If you pump 100 barrels at 50 to 1, your net gain is 98 barrels. Not that significant. Even a reduction from 10 to 1 to 5 to 1 only costs you another 10 barrels ( 90 net vs 80 net ). It is when you start to approach 1 to 1 that the viability of the process becomes suspect. So at 1.5 to 1 the tarsands is viable, but only just.
On another thread I was trying to speculate as to how this was going to play out with what I fear will be a shortage of available NG for the bitumen process. Even with the MacKenzie pipeline built and flowing, who will decide whether the NG is diverted to the tarsands for processing, or whether it will flow southward to a NG hungry U.S.A. ?
Nuclear would seem to be the only option. It would not surprise me at all to see plans for a nuclear plant come out for tender in the next few years.
Joined: May 22, 2004 Posts: 1438 Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 9:43 am Post subject:
I don't think EROEI is a terribly good metric. My problem with it is that it is as much a moving target as are energy prices. With improvements in technological efficiency both the EROEI and price will improve for some of the marginal energy plays such as solar, wind, ethanol, and small oil and gas fields. So instead of EROEI you can just keep thinking of it as a matter of economics.
I suppose EROEI does have the advantage of stripping out any hidden subsidies, but on the other hand it is fiendishly hard to calculate, (eg. where do you draw the line on energy investment, the people working in the factories making the solar panels have got to eat). If you take the broadest view of energy investment overall our EROEI is 1.00 because it takes our entire world economy to support either directly or indirectly the energy extraction industry.
Joined: May 21, 2004 Posts: 198 Location: East Coast USA
Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 10:15 am Post subject:
EROEI is quite useful because it enables us to get a rough picture of the do-ability of various energy technologies. Yes, the EROEI of a given energy process can shift substantially one way or the other because of depletion and evolving technology (which makes the concept even more useful in tracking the situations as it changes).
The EROEI of oil sand recovery may improve from 1.5 to 2.0 or 2.5 because of improving technology. Perhaps it will get even better than that if biotechnogy can be harnessed to perform the extraction process, which I expect may ultimately happen. I think tar sands oil will have a place in the transition to a hydrogen economy, but make no mistake about it- this energy source isn't producible at efficiency levels sufficient to permit us to keep living like the unrestrained energy hogs we have been. We're in for some major belt-tightening if we are forced to turn to the tar sands for the bulk of our liquid energy. _________________ www.searchingforthetruth.com
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Joined: May 24, 2004 Posts: 3429 Location: California, USA
Posted: Wed Jun 09, 2004 1:14 am Post subject:
FYI, the excavators used in those operations are powered by electricity, delivered via large flexible cables from central distribution points. There is effectively no limit to the size of excavator that can be powered that way. 25 - 50 cubic yard buckets are common, but that's just the beginning
The machine you see on the home page was called "Big Muskie," and the homepage picture barely does justice to the size of it.
Click on the links "the machines." Then click on "Draglines." Then click on "Big Muskie." Scroll down the page a ways and you'll see a photo of this machine on site. Compared to it, a large dozer looks like a Tonka toy would look sitting next to a normal size machine. This rig had a bucket with a capacity of 200+ cubic yards, big enough to hold a number of pickup trucks parked inside, easily. It was the largest piece of moveable machinery ever built. And it was all powered by electricity.
I can't find the link, but in Germany there are "bucket-wheel excavators" that are also powered by electricity. These discharge continuously, into conveyor belt systems that take the minerals to the processing plant. The conveyor system can signicantly reduce the need for those diesel-powered haul trucks.
So, a dedicated reactor on the site should be able to cover a good chunk of the energy needed for mining, hauling, and processing.
The gray sand may be usable for the fine aggregate in concrete used to build housing and other facilities near the site. If what they're referring to as "sand" includes particle sizes up to 1", then we have a source of gravel on site also. (Don't use it for reactor domes until it has proven its structural worth on other applications.)
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) water. What comes out is supposed to be pretty much perfect light,sweet crude and they do have the cost of processing down to $10/bl so it is clearly profitable now (and more so as NYMEX price goes up, up, up.) But the other products of the processing are grey sand that has to be returned to the stripmined area (grab the magazine for a great shot of a very ugly refilled hole from past processing) and some water that no one would want to drink.
