[Pablo2079]

Once Canada is able to export to the EU and Asia, the value of the oil derived from oil sands will increase dramatically.

I don't think that Canada hasn't been able to develop the resource (no delays, no lack of investment due to KS XL being delayed), it's just that Canadians are tired of giving the U.S. the family discount. Location Location Location...... Effectively, pipelines will improve the location of their resources relative to the world market.

[ROCKMAN]

Pablo - But it is the Canadians that haven't developed an export market other than the US. Their responsibility...not ours. OTOH if the US hadn't been buying the production, regardless of price, there would be almost none, if any, oil sands development. Don't like trading their oil for US $'s...fine...keep it in the ground. No one has ever forced one Canadian company to sell production to any US buyer. I didn't like the price I was getting for my oil in Texas so I put it on a barge and sent it to a refinery in Louisiana… at my expense. IOW I didn’t just sit there and complain about what Texas refineries pay. I did something about it. If the Canadians aren’t developing other export markets then they are choosing to market predominantly to the US. Again, their decision…not ours.

[FoxV]

Is it really us Canadian's Rockman? I've always been under the impression that the majority of our oil production is, at least in a controlling interest, in hands of American companies.

Although to be honest I don't really have any info for or against this. I do know that before the last crash, American companies were buying up Canadian assets left right and center. Now that oil prices have dropped and Fracking south of the board has become a big thing, we don't hear much of US investment in Canadian oil any more (lots of talk about chinese and european companies coming in though).

Personally, I wonder if behind the scenes the blocking of the XL pipeline has more to do with the Frackers not wanting cheaper Canadian oil flooding into their market. But again, no facts or reports for this, just a suspicion that something doesn't seem right with the way Keystone is being handled.

btw, I'm for the Energy East project. I like the idea of keeping it in Canada

[dissident]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'C')anada---the next oil SUPERPOWER? Not so sure as it is soon to be surrounded by two hippy dope smoking entities . . . Washington and Alaska.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dissident', 'C')anada ... will not make it any sort of superpower. Canada needs to produce over 10 million barrels per day by 2030 just to feed the US market ...

[Paulo1]

re:
"But it is the Canadians that haven't developed an export market other than the US. Their responsibility...not ours."

Canada does not own the oil or pipelines. They provide environmental oversights, (ha ha ha) and take a royalty cut. Citizens get lots of high paying jobs. Taxes help pay for our social programs. There will one day be a new and larger pipeline to the coast. Probably not Northern Gateway, but perhaps a 900,000 bbl/day Kinder Morgan upgrade that already exists. Hopefully, improved access to Ontario and Quebec will lessen imports there. The crunch is that no one wants tanker traffic after Exxon Valdez. Personally, I would like to see increased exports go through Kinder Morgan and through Vancouver. I like the idea of the Yuppie urabanites, who burn most of the oil used in BC and funnel their air degradation up the Fraser Valley, to assume the risk of their fossil fuel reliance. Plus, it's a hell of a lot safer to run the tankers up Burrard inlet than up to Kitimat. If there is a spill in "green Vancouver", also known as Hongcouver, it might make this car driving culture really ponder the proliferation of ring roads, new bridges and mega freeways. If a spill occurs on the North Coast, all we will hear is "tsk tsk too bad so sad, and can we take in some more sea otters in the aquarium"?

Maybe you can guess that I live on the coast 150 miles west of Vancouver and care about our ocean and wildlife?

Oh yeah, my son is a well paid industrial electrician in/for the oil industry. All of his friends work in one way or another in and for the oil industry. Why? It pays 2 or 3X what other industries pay and the work is steady. No brainer. If I was his age I would be there too.

My son lives a few hundred metres from me and does not want the pipeline here, either. If you could see where we live you would understand. And no, my wife and I seldom drive anymore. We are trying our best.

regards....Paulo

[BobInget]

Canada is by far the United State's largest trading partner. They sell us oil, we send them everything else.
There will never be time when the US does not need to import. Nor a time when Canada won't need our
raw and manufactured goods. (I know about agriculture, just being simple minded)

Keystone XL has been delayed so long, absolute need became moot. Rail transport is already in place and expandable without much governmental interference. Canada IMPORTS more oil (proportionally)
then does US. One small gas pipeline may already be reversed, two more are in planning stages.
In the mean time Calgary has the Stampede and oil sands expansion to keep busy.

[electro-rail]

Gents: Sorry I missed this back and forth posting about where will Canada (and the USA) send it's petroleum products by 2020?

Asia is the short answer. By way of the newly upgraded Valdez supertanker terminal.

Delivered to Glenallen & Delta Junction by the state-of-art railway purpose-built to handle: raw bit, pure bit, synbit, railbit, dilbit, the new partially upgraded bitumen (Auterra) similar to WCS, but without sulfur, acids and heavy metals, and fully refined products.

The railway won't be a One Trick Pony pipeline. It will actually ship other stuff too.

ARC Financial agrees that we are already in the era of Looking Beyond Pipelines that have failed to deliver - ENB Gateway, TC KXL and soon the KM TMX (as there is not much risk difference for the BC coast waters)…

Deloitte performed a survey and as much indicated in their recent report, Gaining ground in the oil sands 2014, that the majority of industry experts agreed that the ENB Gateway and TC KXL will never get built. And that was last fall - 2013….imagine how they feel now?

The really Big Shoe drops in June when PM Harper approves or disapproves the Gateway pipeline through BC.

Chaos and Calm will both proceed. The Game-Changing, Nation-Building Railway to Alaska will emerge from the mist in order to offer an option to supertanker spill risk imposed on our entire precious west coast of BC.

The Enviros, the First Nations, AK Native Tribes, the oil patch in Alberta can all get a little something out of this alterNATIVE project and together, we can all strive to do better in the oil sands…

With the massive uplift in price per barrel, we can certainly afford it.

[ROCKMAN]

Electro - It always amazes me that with $trillions in revenue for corporations and govts on the table some folks don't believe systems won't be developed to exploit the situation. It would certainly happen even if we weren't facing PO.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('electro-rail', 'w')here will Canada (and the USA) send it's petroleum products by 2020?

Asia is the short answer. By way of the newly upgraded Valdez supertanker terminal.

Delivered to Glenallen & Delta Junction by the state-of-art railway purpose-built to handle: raw bit, pure bit, synbit, railbit, dilbit, the new partially upgraded bitumen (Auterra) similar to WCS, but without sulfur, acids and heavy metals, and fully refined products.

The railway won't be a One Trick Pony pipeline. It will actually ship other stuff too.

[Graeme]

Boycotting Tar Sands Oil: Will It Work?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hat if you could choose where your fuel comes from?

In the United States, crude oil that is refined into gasoline comes from many sources: Mexico, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia all supply the American market, along with oil fields in states such as Texas and North Dakota.

The largest share of U.S. petroleum, however, comes from Canada's oil sands—a fount of new oil wealth that is behind the push to expand the Keystone XL pipeline to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.

Now the Sierra Club and other groups opposed to the pipeline are urging corporations to shift their fuel purchases away from refineries that process sticky diluted bitumen, or "dilbit," from the Canadian oil sands. (See related story: "Oil Spill Spotlights Keystone XL Issue: Is Canadian Crude Worse?")

The aim is to make the transportation-fuel industry more transparent, and to hinder the expansion of tar sands development. But it remains uncertain how much real impact such a boycott can have.

[electro-rail]

Rockman: Yes I agree, as I have come to learn over the past 6-7 years…the cash-flow numbers are just huge in this primary energy business & industry in Alberta.

I have also learned that it doesn't matter if you have a good idea, such as rail as an intelligent, reasonable option to the imposition of pipelines thru BC filling supertankers off our coast, nobody was listening to the simple math….because Corp Canada, led first by Enbridge, now Kinder Morgan (a US Company) insist on pursuing what they know best…providing exclusive capacity in a pipe to open season bidders, capable of plunking down $100M to reserve just a 10% take-or-pay portion of a pipe capacity for 20 years, in order to provide the steady guaranteed returns Canadian pension funds and other pipeline shareholders just love to buy, hold and enjoy…all the while keeping out almost all the medium-small, innovative oil sands producers from access to these pipeline arteries for getting the oil to market.

That's why the producers in Alberta, who don't have access to pipe long term are very happy to ship by rail, because to them, it is cheaper than the pipe and dilbit merry-go-round to the USGC, which BTW, is much further than going to Valdez and Pacific tidewater in Alaska, some 2 to 4 days shorter distance to Asian markets by supertanker.

However, the challenge will be to build this massive $20B + infrastructure project. Financing it is not the problem, as China or the other Asian countries, are willing to provide the loans…as when you can ship 1.5 M bpd on a single track quite easily, and charge higher than typical rail freight rates of ~$60/ton or $10/barrel, 1.5M x 365 = ~$5-6 B a year in revenue, you can easily justify such an investment.

But you can't force the horse to drink the water, if that horse wants to insist on doing business-as-usual and force pipelines through BC without social license to do so.

Jim Prentice, who quit the Harper cabinet in apparent frustration a few years ago, was recently "hired" away from his lofty CIBC vice-chairman job, to go into hostile First Nations territory and give that Dead Horse Gateway one more flogging by offering up The Big Cheque in exchange for approval to allow the oil to flow..

He got no where so now he is about to run for the ruling but troubled Alberta PC party (47 years straight in power - world-wide "democracy" record). Maybe he will understand the wisdom of going around brick walls, rather than through them, who knows?

but we will see.

[electro-rail]

Thanks Plantangenet for the great photo!

I assume that's a fairly recent shot in the early days of spring run-off?

Yes it is a key piece of structure to connect the AKRR up with the G7G Railway (or RailRoad, until it crosses the US-Can border just 200 miles further east). It will be a huge boost for the future of Port MacKenzie which is also gaining a rail spur upgrade.

It's almost as if the Alaskans knew years ago that this long a waited rail link to Lower 48 was going to happen!

[Plantagenet]

Yes, exactly right.---its been kind of mysterious why this very expensive bridge is going in over the Tanana when it will only extend the Alaska railroad another 80 miles or so to the east.

On the other hand, if the long-promised railroad link to Canada is on the verge of becoming reality, then it all makes more sense.

[ROCKMAN]

Electro - Glad you're here to keep is informed of the rail dynamics. The next few years will be interesting as the rail infrastructure expands and pipelines are completed., potential for excess transport capacity which my lead to competition induced lower prices which might boost oil sands development. And then toss in east/west coast overseas sales. I wouldn't try to guess where it levels out in 5 or 7 years.

[TheDude]

You just can trust these coniving foreign powers, whether in China, Canada, or, uh, California: Energy Watch: California buying more Canadian oil sands crude - BNN News

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')During the first three months of 2013, California imported slightly under 90,000 barrels of Canadian oil via train according to Bloomberg data. From early January to the end of March this year, the same data shows that figure topped 700,000 barrels, an increase of roughly 700% over just one year.

Of course, that figure is for all Canadian crude delivered to California on railways in the first quarter of this year, which conceivably could be entirely lighter oil derived from outside northern Alberta’s oil sands region where the heavier bitumen produced generally trades as Western Canada Select (WCS) grade. Chris Theal, CEO of Kootenay Capital, notes most of the refining capacity on the west coast of the United States is geared to process light oil, largely from Alaska.

“That being said, the Bakersfield area is a legacy heavy oil area and would be where Canadian heavy or dilbit [read: diluted bitumen] would displace local supply,” Theal said. “Particularly if the [price] spreads are wide enough to justify the rail transport costs to get it there.”

[Tanada]

Does anyone have a break down of how much bitumen is extracted using each technique? SAGD/THAI/THAI-CAPRI/Surface Mining? When everything went up the creek without a paddle all different methods were being discussed but these days almost all I see are total liquids shipped. I got to thinking about this reading the thread on Tertiary and other methods of recovery for conventional fields.

[DesuMaiden]

I read this interesting article about oil sands production.

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20130 ... it-bitumen

Oil sands have a very poor EROEI (Energy Return Over Energy Invested). The EROEI is only 5:1 to 2.9:1. Basically you are expending almost as much energy to produce it as you get from using it as an energy source. You want the proof? Here it is.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')all, who wasn't involved in Hughes' study, thinks the EROI for oil sands would fall closer to 1:1 if the tar sands' full life cycle—including transportation, refinement into higher quality products, end use efficiency and environmental costs—was taken into account

[Paulo1]

Hi Desumaiden,

It might be better to do more research on topics, on this site and others, before you continually post assertions on topics you don't understand or know much about. If you were one of my past students I would advise you to listen and wait and your questions may be answered before raising your hand. I would do this privately, but in this circumstance I can't.

We can all find links and news stories to quickly jump on and post, but most seasoned P Oilers wait and see what arises on topic, and also wait for other opinions to surface.

Coping with the understanding of PO is a process. It is also dynamic. It takes many years to appreciate the psychological impacts this understanding has on people, and often many years to develop a new paradigm in order to remain healthy and strong enough to go forward with a new way of living. For if this knowledge does not change us and change us for the better, why bother? As you meld your knowledge and understanding of PO into a grouping we think of as a 'personal point of view', and if this POV is based on life experience and accurate data then over time you have an opinion that others want to hear.

There are a few general assertions that come up all the time on this site, and I will list a few examples.

PO will cause economic collapse and/or economic collapse will cause PO.

Renewables will save us all and/or renewables will not work without oil.

Electric cars will solve all transportation issues and/or they won't because of range limits.

Oil Sands are evil, ineffiecient...and/or they have a role and are delaying the effects of PO.

Fracking is a new and evil technology destroying eco-systems, and/or fracking is old technology and has been used safely for decades.

Take your pick. There are scores of articles and links that quite effectively argue each assertion. There are post after post of individuals that passionately assert one view or another, or somewhere in between.

I will return to your headline, "Tar Sands are Uneconomical for Oil Production." Okay, and you say this because.....? While I no longer have family members who work there, I do know there are hundreds of thousands of Canadians who do. I know at least 100 people who work in Alberta, and appreciate it is one of the few sources of revenue that is keeping our Federal Govt. somewhat solvent. Without the 'Oil Sands' money, many facets of our society would not exist and on this list are many things we take for granted, cherish, and define us as Canadian. I submit to you, if any activity is uneconomical it is called a 'charity', and the last time I looked the multi-national oil companies operating in 'The Sands' are far from being charitable organizations. When a 'project' becomes uneconomical as per required revenues, it will be mothballed or shut down permanently as is the pulp mill where I used to live. Those projects would not exist, pure and simple.

As a 59 year old who has worked in three different industries, raised a family, has a few university degrees, one trade, and one technical profession under my belt (all obtained by distance learning and night school long before online course offerings were common place), and as someone who has lost jobs due to economic declines, recessions, and had to work away for months at a time to maintain family and mortgage, I have learned to be more forgiving about folks who work in industries I don't agree with. There are damn good reasons why someone from Newfoundland runs a machine in a Ft Mac Oil sand operation. It is called survival. They are there for the same reasons a migrant worker picks berries in the Fraser Valley, or why my neighbour falls trees in a remote coastal logging camp. Unless one is on the public teat, or has independent means, people have to work and that means going to where the work is.

Headlines are about people. I urge you (someone who is very young) and has yet to forge ahead in life to maintain this perspective.

This is a time for someone who is young, and PO aware, to establish themselves in life in a mindful and deliberate manner. You don't want to be the 'leaf floating downstream' as events propel us forward as it seems most likely to do. Pick a career that can adapt to energy constraints and will make the world a better place.

regards...paulo