Oil sands no magic bullet

Michael Fumento, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service, recently offered an optimistic picture of our petroleum supply, based primarily on the potential for Canadian oil sands to produce bitumen, a “tarlike goo” that can be refined into gasoline and other petroleum products.

The Canadian deposits are enormous — more than a trillion barrels. Mr. Fumento reassures us that the petroleum doomsayers are wrong: At current rates of use, the oil sands could supply us with energy for another 500 years.
This bright prospect — an enormous reserve of non-OPEC petroleum just across a friendly border — sounds almost too good to be true. Unfortunately, it probably is.

Petroleum extraction from oil sands is expensive, energy-intensive and dirty. Deposits often lie beneath 100 feet or more of earth, and about 2 tons of sand must be mined to produce a barrel of oil. The result isn’t the light sweet crude that comes from Saudi Arabia; it’s an extra-heavy oil that requires considerable further processing to yield gasoline and other products. Finally, each barrel of oil leaves behind about 2? barrels of murky wastewater, retained in vast contaminated ponds near the production site.

Washington Times