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The tar sands of Alberta in Canada may hold as much as 3 trillion barrels of oil, but it is hard to extract and the process could be environmentally devastating.
Only a small proportion of this is likely to be ever extracted. Current estimates of the extractable oil in the tar sands is 175 bn barrels, which is still sizeable, comparing to Saudi Arabia’s conventional oil reserve of an estimated 264 bn barrels.
Oil companies are rushing to Alberta and planning to invest $50bn in the next decade so as to increase output from 1.3m barrels per day now to 4m bpd by 2020.
Given that current global consumption of oil is running at more than 80m bpd even this increased capacity will have little impact on global supply.
The process of extraction is more expensive financially, energetically and environmentally.Each barrel of oil extracted from the tar sands will cost
about $15-20 - but with world oil prices as they are then this becomes financially viable.
about 750 cubic feet of natural gas - today’s level of extraction burns 600 cubic feet per day, equivalent to the consumption of 3.2m homes.
about five barrels of water - it is not clear that the local environment can sustain this
three times as much greenhouse gases as production of conventional oil. Canada’s emissions have risen from 138 m tonnes in 1997 to 270m tonnes in 2005. It is no wonder that they have refused to sign the Kyoto protocol.
This data comes from an article by Derek Brower in Prospect Magazine Feb 2008
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