[mustang19]

With nothing else to do I suppose I'm reduced to finding errors in other blogs. Here goes.

His article, Annual Reserve Revisions Part V: Oil Sands, starts off with the implication that oil sands actually matter. In reality their EROI is exceptionally low, such that Albertas per capita income is lower than before the recession. But in any case.

George Kaplan is actually an excellent writer who has made many good predictions, and shouldn't be writing on that blog, but in any case he is just giving the corporate reserve estimates and not attempting to back them up.

The cold lake, Athabaska and peace river area is twice the size of permian with about the same area and from the same to twice the porosity. Athabaskan can be surface mined. Cold lake is underground and has high porosity. Peace river is similar. The largest area is athabaska with low porosity, maybe 3% versus 15% for tight fields.

Given permian has around 150 billion original oil in place as I already gave, and surface recovery is only about 20% of the resource, a reasonable total recovery is around 50% for Alberta with 30 billion oil sands in place, 6 billion surface mined, 150 billion everything else so 90 billion recovery. This is just oil- bitumen has maybe 10x less API gravity and is 20x more. That gives us three trillion bitumen in place- a lot more than the official estimate- at one trillion recovery. One hundred billion barrels can be surface mined.

This is a hundred years of surface mining. At current growth this would die in a decade or two. The surface mining industry has at least a little bit of time, so the "fifty year" life Kaplan gives is pretty reasonable.

The underground steam assisted SAGD is a lot more. That's 1,000 years of current production. However under the same growth it will die late in the century. At that point the field production will equal current global production, except with a uselessly high share of heavy products. It also will not stop Canada from starving to death because all the real oil is imported. Tar sands remain more or less a slave project that isn't having economic result.

So in conclusion Kaplan does his best but doesn't really mention the absurdity.