by shortonoil » Sat 25 Apr 2009, 21:30:30
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')or you Newcomes here Alberta has more Oil than Saudi Arabia, and that doesn't include Sasketchewan our sister Province.
For all you late comers, Alberta has almost no oil. What it has is bitumen, sort of a greasy slim, dredged out of northern Canadian glacial sand deposits. You then add lots and lots of hydrogen to make a refinable petroleum (sort of). The hydrogen comes from NG. If I remember my calculations from last year it takes 19,000 mcf of NG to make 1 million barrels of almost refinable crude. Almost the entire monthly NG production of the US.
Then it takes lots and lots of water. Which they dump into immense scum ponds. The earth looks like a moonscape when they are finished, and the energy gotten out of it may not be as much as what the NG had before they started?
The natural gas they use is stranded gas, and there is a lot less of it than there is tar sands to process. Of course if the Canadian government puts down a few 10s of billions to build a 2500 mile pipeline over thawing and collapsing tundra, they can get gas from McKenzie up along the Hudson Bay. They can then destroy another chunk of land the size of Connecticut within the next 10 years. Sounds like a real winner doesn’t it?
Of course with oil at $40/b most of those projects are probably loosing money, but if it keeps GM’s Chinese plants in business one more year, who can complain about a little ecological devastation. The lunacy just goes on and on.
As far as all of that uranium in the Cameco mine up along McArthur River, if I remember, it produced a little more than a third of Canada’s total production. Well it did. It is has been flooded since last year when they broke into an underground river. CA’s uranium production has gone way, way down. If the history of flooded mines is any indication, it is likely to stay that way for a long, long time.
If the newest climate models are correct, that is the earth is snapping back into another 180 year period of cooling similar to the 1800s, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta will again be nothing more than what they have always been. Vast, barren, desolate pieces of moose pasture.
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