Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? George Orwell
Is it “tar sands” or “oil sands”? I’m referring to that stuff up by Fort McMurray that enables Stephen Harper to call Canada an “energy superpower”.
Out of curiosity, I googled both terms. Tar sands got just over ½ million hits, while oil sands got well over a million hits. What gives? Weren’t they always called tar sands?
Unfortunately, tar just doesn’t sound as lucrative as oil. Tar is the stuff we put on roads and roofs to seal cracks. Oil is the stuff we refine and then put in our cars so that we can go to work, get groceries, and take our kids to soccer practice.
Oil flows up through the ground. Tar just sits there. Oil flows in pipelines. Tar just sits there. That’s the real problem. Tar doesn’t flow.
Sure, we’ve got the equivalent energy of 1.7 trillion barrels of oil up there (with about 10% of it thought to be actually recoverable), but it ain’t oil, folks. It’s tar.
In order to get tar to flow, we either have to heat it up or chemically alter it. Both of those options take energy -- a lot of energy. Mostly, we’ve been using natural gas. In fact, it takes anywhere from 750 to 1,200 cubic feet of natural gas to produce a single barrel of oil from tar.
(My rough calculations indicate that during the very coldest days in January, 750 cubic feet of natural gas would be enough to heat an average home for a few days.)
Another way to get the tar to flow is to upgrade some of it into synthetic oil, and then mix enough of it with the rest of the tar so that it will flow. Nothing is free, though, so the upgrading process would both take energy and cough up a bit more CO2 into the atmosphere.
A nuclear plant is another option that has been put forth. A nuclear plant could both heat the tar and produce hydrogen to treat it chemically. However, it has other problems associated with it (perhaps that will be another column).
Perhaps the silliest way to deal with the problem is the Enbridge way. Enbridge has just been given approval for a pipeline up to Fort McMurray. This pipeline would transport lighter oil to McMurray, which would then be used to mix with the tar so that the resulting mix could be put into another pipeline to flow back down south…to the United States…to be upgraded…by American workers…for American consumers.
But I’m straying from my main point, which is that since tar can’t flow, it’s a lot more expensive to deal with. And it certainly shouldn’t be called oil. And even after you get the stuff to flow, you still have to upgrade it into something that can be refined into gasoline and other products.
So it takes a lot of energy to get energy -- at least when you’re working with tar. This is where EROI comes in. Energy return on investment is the ratio of how much energy you get out of a process versus how much you put into it.
Estimates for the EROI ratio for the tar sands vary from about 5:1 to 1.5:1. I suspect that the 5:1 estimates just take into account the energy of the upgrading inputs such as the natural gas.
I suspect that it doesn’t take into account the energy needed to make those great big dump trucks and all of the diesel fuel that goes into those great big dump trucks. Or perhaps the energy needed to produce and replace the teeth on the dragline buckets that wear out in a single work shift.
We could list pages and pages of embodied energy that goes into the steel and plastic and rubber and diesel needed to get tar out of the ground. And each time the price of oil goes up another $10, those inputs get more expensive. Just think how the whole process will be affected by $250 barrels of oil. The fact that tar will also fetch a higher price will be of little comfort to consumers (it will certainly be of no comfort at all to the flora and fauna of the Fort McMurray region).
We are a province in denial. Perhaps the first important step toward healing will be to admit that tar is not oil.