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tar
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tar sands resources
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| Region | Recoverable resources in billions of barrels, assuming a 37% recovery factor | Alternative estimates from utah.gov, corrected to the 37% rate |
| United States | 626 | 592 |
| South America (Brazil) | 300 | 89 |
| Russia | 41 | |
| Zaire | 38 | |
| Jordan | 25 | |
| Morroco | 21 | |
| Australia | 17 | 14 |
| Canada | 16 | 9 |
| Italy | 13 | |
| China | 10 | |
| Estonia | 1 | 7 |
| Israel | 2 | |
| Northern and western Europe | 2 | |
| Other countries | 3 | |
The cost of extraction is much higher than most pumped oil and is, therefore, commercially unattractive while there is a ready flow of cheaper, recoverable pumpable oil. Then comes coal extraction and renewable plant extraction potential. In Brazil, for example, petrol contains 28% plant ethanol. See references to sugar cane ethanol in Biofuels briefing document.
Shale oil is guesstimated as approximately half as efficient to produce as oil from tar sands. American oil shales are also located in arid areas which are more ecologically sensitive than the tar sand areas of Canada.
Excellent PowerPoint presentation on shale oils from geology.utah.gov. On the presentation is the remarkably frank admission that there is “no proven technology for commercial recovery”.
“Oil & Gas Journal estimates close to 180 billion barrels [in Canadian tar sands], second only to Saudi Arabia's approximately 260 billion, while BP Statistical Review of World Energy puts the figure at about 17 billion barrels, based on oil sands under active development. And the Canadian oil sands don't even turn up on the International Energy Agency's industry lists of the 10 countries with the largest proven oil reserves.
“Even the higher industry estimate is only about a six-year world supply, as the planet now consumes close to 30 billion barrels of oil a year.”
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“Tar sands production is now 1 million barrels a day and is projected to increase fivefold by 2030, still about half of Saudi Arabia's current output and less than 5 percent of world production in 2030.” [Quoted from energybulletin.net]
page 1 page 2 page3 page 4 page 5 page 6
“Take molasses out of your kitchen cupboard, put as much sand in there as molasses, stir it up, and then put it outside where it gets cold and thick and won't flow - well, that's what the tar sand is like. It's extremely hard to work with, and it wrecks all your equipment."
—
“ [...] Based on current mining leases, the oil sands may transform that Florida-sized swath of forest into a massive lunar landscape - much of it unlikely ever to return to its original state. (Existing projects have already stripped roughly 460 square kilometres.) As well, the mining operations are licensed to draw 349 million cubic metres of fresh water from the Athabasca every year, twice the amount used by Calgary, a city of one million people. Some of the water is recycled, but most of the muddy leftovers, or tailings, wind up in those toxic "ponds" that are large enough to be seen from space.”
Photo
library of Alberta oil sands
Very useful, zoomable, high resolution pictures.
Some have further, interesting, audio commentary.
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Zoomed image showing
excavator, and dump truck, as high as a two-sroey building, hauling away
spoil and oil/tar sands.
end note |
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© abelard, 2007,18 june the address for this document is http://www.abelard.org/briefings/tar_sands_shale_oil.php 670 words |
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“Most
of the world's oil (more than 5 trillion barrels) is in the form of
tar sands, although it is not all recoverable. While tar sands are found
in many places worldwide, the largest deposits in the world are found
in Canada (Alberta) and Venezuela, which each have about one-third of
the world's total tar sands resources, 
and
much of the rest is found in various countries in the Middle East. In
the United States, tar sands resources are primarily concentrated in
Eastern Utah, mostly on public lands. The in-place tar sands oil resources
in Utah are estimated at 12 to 20 billion barrels.”
“The
term oil shale generally refers to any sedimentary rock that contains
solid bituminous materials (called kerogen) that are released as petroleum-like
liquids when the rock is heated in the chemical process of pyrolysis.
Oil shale was formed millions of years ago by deposition of silt and
organic debris on lake beds and sea bottoms. Over long periods of time,
heat and pressure transformed the materials into oil shale in a process
similar to the process that forms oil; however, the heat and pressure
were not as great. Oil shale generally contains enough oil that it will
burn without any additional processing, and it is known as "the
rock that burns". ”