Syncrude Canada Ltd. is the world’s largest producer of crude oil from oil sands and the largest single source producer in Canada. They currently supply 13 percent of Canada’s petroleum requirements. A relative new company in the oil industry, they claim to be much more energy efficient as well as more friendly to the environment.
Arthur Noll
They have an interesting website, but it hardly makes me feel that their approach will provide a significant replacement for conventional fossil fuels. The energy figures stated for the production of “syncrude” at one of their plants does not include the energy costs for building and maintaining the plant, dealing with tailings and restoration costs.
A few more figures from the website:
Nearly 450,000 tones of materials, equipment, vessels and plant components traveled the highway to the construction site.
Every 24 hours there is enough metal worn off the mining equipment, by abrasive oil sand, to make two full-size pick-up trucks.
How much energy was expended to make all this stuff and transport it to the site, how much to build and maintain the road?
If all this stuff were to be made and moved with the energy gotten from the oil sands, how much would be left over? Not forgetting the oil used by the 10,000 workers building the plant, likely a similar number making the parts, and the 5,000 running the place, and the people supporting them. The abrasion rate is pretty high, and that is only for the mining equipment. I have to think there is also high erosion of equipment dealing with slurry. They admit themselves that the operating conditions for much of the plant is severe. The life of the system doesn’t look great, very high maintenance, and it took very large amounts of energy to build it. The energy to build it would have come mostly from “conventional” sources, greatly distorting the cost.
The operation has produced about a billion cubic meters of “tailings”, a sludge estimated to take centuries to solidify on its own. They are adding gypsum to speed up the process, but guess what that takes? Mining gypsum somewhere else, transporting it, mixing it in. More energy… Other ways will also cost energy. I have to think that they chose a site to start, that had the least amount of overburden to remove, and that other places will have more to remove, at greater energy cost.
I have to have serious doubts about the EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) on this business, and how long it can be maintained if it is positive for the moment. Looks to me that they have taken “cheap” conventional fuels and used them to build the system, a typical accounting error when using money. When conventional fuels get scarcer and cost more money, oil sand extraction costs will likely go up in step with it. Much the same as with many “renewable” technologies, that are built and largely maintained with fossil fuel.
Even though there is a lot of this oil sand, it is a finite amount, and eventually the operation would have to stop. In the meantime, they will have ripped up a lot of biology, and used any energy extracted to rip up even more biology elsewhere, plowing fields, cutting trees, building, paving, maintaining what has already been build and paved, polluting the air with so much burning, spilling oil in water, doing mining operations elsewhere, that also have to end and be restored. What is the point of all this activity? Why is it good to have so many people doing all this, when it obviously has to end at some point? And end with far more truly sustainable systems destroyed, than end up restored.
Lewis Regenstein Comments:
Arthur, your analysis is important and valuable. Your thoughts confirm what I have been writing about for the past several weeks. Since energy is so heavily subsidized, it does not much matter how much it costs to get it out of the ground, as long as we can pour it into our internal combustion powered cars & burn it. Even if it takes more energy to extract oil from the sand deposits than the oil will produce, you can’t put oil sand in a car & get on the highway.
The same inefficiencies prevail with other favored, subsidized commodities in our society, such as beef, which uses huge amounts of edible grain, corn, and/or soy (plus energy) to produce a far smaller amount of edible meat. But people want their steaks and burgers, so we pay for it, with the help of the taxpayer.
The inefficiencies (if that is the right word) in energy production will just result in higher prices for oil, not an end to its production, as long as the taxpayers keep subsidizing the costs instead of including them in the price of oil. If the latter were done, this would make it exorbitantly expensive today, given the huge military costs of keeping the oil shipping lanes in the Gulf open and in keeping Iraq & Iran out of Kuwait & Saudi Arabia (perhaps $100 million a year ? in peacetime just to keep the 6th fleet in the Gulf), plus the massive health, environmental, & agricultural damages/costs incurred in drilling for, shipping, offloading, & burning oil.
Taking all this into consideration, oil from Canadian sand deposits might be cheaper than the more readily accessible Middle east oil. But all of it is more expensive than renewable sources, which, with much lower government subsidies, could save huge amounts of money as well as energy.
One cannot apply standard economic analyses to oil production since the costs are largely socialized and the profits privatized, so efficiency and sustainability do not much matter to the people in charge of this stuff, & this is one reason depletion and disaster lie a little further down this road we are travelling.