Colorado Tar Sands?

[Eclipsenow]

What do people make about the extravagant claims for Colorado tar sands? 2 trillion barrels untouched only because it has always been cheaper to import oil, etc, is the argument I'm finding in another forum.

Has Heinberg or someone on Energy Bulletin touched on this specifically? I know a great deal of attention goes on Athabasca, but what about Colorado oil sands?

Cheers.

PS: Anyway to turn on an email function so I get an email every time someone answers this thread?

[Buzz Clik]

1. Actually, Colorado has oil shale, not tar sands.

Same claim, however.

Extraction of petroleum from the shale was pursued some decades ago. It's energy intensive and environmentally highly intrusive.

Bottom line: if it made sense economically, it would be happening right now.

[youngdem]

2. Dirty to use, expensive to get at, and horribly destructive to harvest

On par with the Canadian oil sands now in production.

[papau]

3. When we need oil 500 years in the future, solar power will be used on the oil shale to get it. The

oil recovered has energy that is perhaps 2.5 times the energy used to get and make it - 40% is "lost" by the energy requirements to get and make it. The shale is usually heated to 450–500 °C (750-950°F). At this temperature, the kerogen in the shale decomposes to gas, oil vapour and char, a process known as retorting. The gas and oil vapors are separated from the spent shale and cooled causing the oil to condense.

The environmental damage of surface mining a mountain is of course an added cost.

But we do have a lot of it - the United States Energy Information Administration estimates the world supply of oil shale at 2.6 trillion barrels of recoverable oil, 1.0-1.2 trillion barrels of which are in the United States (62% of the world's resources of oil that is in oil shale). We also have a 100 year history of people losing money trying to extract oil from the shale in the US.

So I am waiting for a real need - say 500 years down the road - and the use of solar to get those 950F degrees of heat needed to process it.

[Vulture]

4. Might as well turn coal into oil

Seriously, if we are going to go through the effort to extract shale oil, it would be easier and no more expensive to simply convert our vast coal deposits into liquid fuel. That said, the cost of extracting shale oil has been dropping into interesting ranges as the rising cost of crude oil has been encouraging the development of creative extraction technologies for shale.

[Ready4Change]

5. Colorado has oil shales. Canada has Tar sands, generally.

But both have the same basic problem. They are difficult to extract usable oil from. More expensive money wise. More expensive energy wise. And FAR less wise regarding our environment. (Because getting usable oil from them is a really dirty process.)

[Eclipsenow]

6. Electron economy

We should take the solar and wind and pump it straight into a car, via electrons into an EV.
This should give us a little time to rebuild New Urbanim and eco-cities that offer an attractive lifestyle around moving people, not cars. Some eco-city plans only require 10% of the energy our modern suburban energy-sinks demand, yet offer modern conveniences as well.

When oh when are we going to learn?

EV's, at this stage, are not forever, even from renewable energy sources.
The rarer metals that make up EV's will one day run out.