BLACK BONANZA
All About the Oil Sands
Chapter One
by Alastair Sweeny
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for
time is the greatest innovator.
-Francis Bacon
Hard-hatted, I'm standing in the middle of a reeking
moonscape of black bitumen-coated sand. Around me are enormous
diesel haulers and an old electric shovel that has had its day.
It's a hot afternoon and the stuff the engineers refer to as
"dirt" stinks like the fresh asphalt I poured in my driveway last
June. I pick up a bit of the dirt - it's soft, moist, and a bit
sticky. My feet even sink gently into the stuff. Later, I find
the leather soles of my shoes are spotted with oil.
Everything is big in the Athabasca Sands. Landing in the
main Syncrude site is like being inside a giant crater on another
planet. The colossal yellow Caterpillar 797Bs that can each haul
400 tons of oil sands from the shovels to the separation plant,
are the biggest trucks money can buy. Each one has the horsepower
of a hundred pickup trucks. They're monster versions of the
yellow Tonkas my sons had in their sandbox. Fully loaded, they
weigh more than two Boeing 747s. Each 400-ton run delivers enough
dirt to make about 200 barrels of oil, or 1,000 U.S. gallons
(3,785 liters) of gasoline.
To get up into the cab, I have to climb fifty feet (15.24
meters) up a welded steel staircase of twenty steps. From the
top, the landscape appears lunar - a lumpy black asphalt field
stretching to the horizon - and over to the east, the greasy
sludge ponds kept in by a monstrous tailing dam - the largest in
the world by volume standing as high as a house. Beside the
plant, the eye is drawn to the neatly stepped pyramid of shocking
yellow sulphur, a byproduct of synthetic crude, to be shipped out
to make fertilizer.
Like the tar that pools out of road asphalt on a blistering
hot day, liquid bitumen has always oozed out of the high banks of
the Athabasca River for as long as native people can remember. In
summer, it can stick to your boots; in winter, you can burn it
like coal. Also called pitch, bitumen is the heaviest of the
naturally occurring crude oils, a hydrocarbon with most of the
hydrogen missing.
The driver says it's a lot different here in the winter when
blizzards roar up the valley from the Arctic Circle. Take some
molasses and put it in the fridge for a few hours. Then try to
pour it. Nothing much happens. That's raw bitumen, as thick and
sticky as cold blackstrap molasses. But try and take it out of
the ground when the temperature is 58 degrees below 0 Fahrenheit
(negative 50 Celsius), and it is as hard as rock.
On a hot June day, with sweat trickling down from under my
Syncrude hardhat, I try to imagine working here in January, on a
windswept landscape where it's so cold that diesel fuel freezes
to the consistency of Vaseline, and light engine oil becomes as
hard as grease. In the worst days of winter whiteout, you have to
keep the engines of these heavy haulers running twenty-four hours
a day. If you let the engine stop when it's that cold, you might
not be able to start it again until the spring thaw three months
later.
The black gold rush currently taking place in the Sands of
the Athabasca is the biggest industrial project on the planet.
The Sands are not pretty and the climate can be brutal, but
for the people who work here mining the Sands, steaming the oil
off underground deposits or just servicing the big operators,
it's a chance to strike it rich in a modern-day Klondike.
If energy is supposed to be the master resource of the human
race, then Canadians are truly blessed. Beneath the boreal forest
of Saskatchewan and Alberta, halfway between Edmonton and the
border of the Northwest Territories, lies a black bonanza of
oil-soaked sand, with more petroleum than the entire Middle East.
It's hard for people to grasp this simple fact - the bitumen and
heavy oil of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan
are the largest known petroleum assets on the planet. Covering an
area larger than England, this belt of oil-soaked silicon dwarfs
the light oil reserves of the entire Middle East. According to
Clive Mather, former head of Shell Canada, "We know there's much,
much more there. The total estimates could be two trillion or
even higher. This is a very, very big resource."
However, this treasure chest lies in rich moist layers that
are not ideal for extraction. Over the past twenty-five years, a
posse of chemists, geologists, and drilling service companies
have spent millions on research to come up with new underground
wizardry that will eventually allow us to extract at least one
trillion barrels from the 80 percent of the Sands which are too
deep to be mined.
On the surface, the strip miners have also refined their
technology, cutting their costs, and squeezing out synthetic
crude by using less and less heat and water. Over the next few
years, they are being forced to apply themselves to drying out
and reclaiming the giant tailing ponds that have so disfigured
the landscape and caused so much hand-wringing from green
activists around the globe.
The below-ground producers have a much smaller footprint,
using an amazing new process - steam assisted gravity drainage or
SAGD - invented by Calgary chemist, Roger Butler, to gently coax
the oil from the sand. These producers use less energy and, in
some cases, are completely recycling heat and water. Some of them
use underground combustion or electricity rather than steam to
warm the bitumen underground. Others are using solvent to reduce
the need for both water and energy for steam. Some are working
out completely closed-loop systems, making their own steam from
the energy below. Underground extraction uses a great deal of
steam and natural gas is still the major fuel source, but massive
new discoveries of gas are coming onstream in North America and
these will keep the costs in line.
In fact, most production and "lifting" costs in the Sands
are not out of line compared to conventional oil and far cheaper
than offshore drilling, plus there is no exploration cost to pay.
It's a huge undertaking. Companies that want to tap into the
bonanza of the Sands are forking over billions of dollars every
year in capital costs and have spent over $1 trillion to date. In
the past twenty-five years, the Sands have generated an economic
impact in GDP terms of more than $3.5 trillion across Canada.
Apart from conventional crude and natural gas, the Sands
alone have paid federal taxes of over $200 billion, and
provincial taxes and royalties of more than $300 billion.
We need this oil, but with all the media reports about
global warming and peak oil, we're stricken with a strange kind
of neurosis. While we sing along with Joni Mitchell when she
complains that we "pave paradise and put up a parking lot," most
of us have no intention of returning to a medieval lifestyle or
taking up hunting and gathering in the boreal forest or some
other "Garden of Eden." Clearly there is little popular support
for shutting the Sands down, and yet there is a strong demand for
more environmental stewardship in the Sands, an issue that is
finally being addressed.
Our way of life requires fossil fuel and we will need it for
at least another half century, or until we develop alternative
sources for powering our lifestyle. The Sands are bountiful. They
offer a stable and secure supply for North America that no other
country in the world can match. After fifty years of tinkering
and innovation, operators can produce synthetic crude out of the
Sands at a price that is getting comparable to conventional crude
and less than offshore oil.
The U.S., in particular, needs this oil-imports from Canada
have doubled over the past decade. Canada now fills about a
quarter of the U.S. oil needs, exporting over 80 million barrels
a month, almost as much as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Nigeria
combined.
Let's be realistic. In spite of all the protests and
complaints, we will never summon the political will to shut down
oil operations like the Sands, because we want to secure and
maintain our standard of living. So where does this black bonanza
leave us in terms of our energy future and security?
First of all, the price of oil is one of the governors of
the world economy, and, perhaps, the most important price of all.
The more oil we can deliver, the more able we are to keep the
price stable or at least reasonable. No one wants to go back to
2008 when the oil market went mad, whipped by speculators and
out-of-control hedge fund trading. Panic drove the price of crude
up to a stratospheric $148 a barrel at the peak. The crash, when
it came, was severe and the price landed with a sickening thud at
$38 a barrel.
Today, unless there are any foolish speculators around who
want to get burned all over again, the price seems to have
stabilized in the mid $70s. It shouldn't go too crazy again until
the lead bulls can generate another crude stampede.
Some people describe the Sands as dirty and nasty, but I
would like to make a pitch for bitumen, because it is one of the
true markers of our civilization. Neanderthal cave people first
used it to glue flint tips onto their spears. Three thousand
years ago, the Mesopotamians valued it highly for waterproofing
boats, bricks, cisterns, water pipes, and pottery, and it was a
sought after trade good throughout the Middle East. Indeed, it
was essential for their way of life and very survival, as their
climate warmed and dried.
Bitumen played a big part in early human religion as well,
from caulking Noah's Ark, to building the Tower of Babel, to the
fire and brimstone that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. I find it
fascinating that some of this religious sentiment was inspired by
a kind of guilt and envy about power that persists even today.
Ancient priestly complaints from the Bible are eerily similar to
the moralistic essence of today's environmental creed - that our
oil-fueled civilization is an affront against nature. Today's
climate crusade is based solidly on the age-old attack by priests
and religion on the follies of human civilization, technology,
and pride. Back in the time of Babylon, it was the Tower of Babel
that was the enemy; today, it's technology, overpopulation,
industry, America, the human race, and now the tar sands of the
Athabasca.
At about the same time as the Klondike gold rush lured
prospectors to the Yukon, the Sands became a magnet for seekers
of black gold. In fact, for the first half of the twentieth
century, the Athabasca Sands were like the Klondike, except in
slow motion. Very slow motion.
In the case of the Athabasca Sands, there was no stampede
and no panic to get at the treasure. No more than fifty
prospectors and drillers came to the remote Athabasca frontier
over a forty year period before World War II. All of these
starry-eyed dreamers went broke, including a dashing German
aristocrat named Alfred von Hammerstein. But they believed they
had the chance to strike it very rich by finding a large pool of
crude oil, or at least make a modest buck by producing barrels of
tar or by mining the Sands to pave the muddy roads of the
Canadian Prairies with Athabasca asphalt. And they made some
progress in understanding the riddle of the Sands. The Athabasca
River was not Bonanza Creek, and bitumen-soaked sand was not gold
dust. At least not at that time.
The main problem faced by early pioneers was the huge extent
of the boreal forest that surrounded the Athabasca River and
tributaries. The Canadian portion amounts to 1.4 billion acres
(5.7 billion square km), but the Athabasca Sands underlays only
35 million acres (142,000 square km) or one-fortieth of the
total. The mineable portion is under 0.1 percent of the whole
boreal ecosystem. So, Canada's boreal forest is, at its heart,
huge and indestructible. It's a deep green desert that will never
be populated to any extent, and the Sands are only a surface
scratch that will ultimately heal.
While most critics of oilsands development focus on its
impact on the natural environment, and some decry the
"destruction of the boreal forest," I don't buy the argument that
the industry will destroy this ecosystem. Believe me, there is an
almost endless supply of boreal forest up there, and a friend of
mine almost died in its vastness.
Years ago, some friends and I were on a prospecting job in
the Northwest Territories to pay our university fees. We were
doing geophysical exploration south of Great Slave Lake, a
three-day walk from any other human life. Flying over it, the
Boreal Forest is an enormous green ocean. Down on the ground, it
was an endless landscape of short, scrubby spruce, peaty muskeg,
grey green reindeer moss, swamp, and shallow lakes, some of them
with springs of warm sulfur-smelling water. One of my friends got
lost, and it took a day to find him. He was smart. He stayed
still until he could hear us shouting.
My friends and I got there in mid-June, when there was
twenty-four hours of daylight and the forest was alive. We heard
moose crashing through the spruce, and saw countless songbirds,
sandhill cranes, and great horned owls. We kept our meat in a
hole in the ground. Five feet down there was frosty soil, as cold
as a beer fridge.
It was truly the kingdom of the mosquito. We worked with
head nets and went through cases of insect repellent. Even the
Dene guys we worked with, who claimed their blood was 5 percent
mosquito venom, said the modern stuff was a hell of a lot better
than bear grease. We prayed for a breeze off Great Slave Lake to
chase away the flies. Most nights I drove the Bombardier muskeg
tractor down to the lake for an icy cold swim and to fill the
water barrel.
Suddenly, we had a frost in August and the bugs were gone.
Then we had deepening darkness at night as our part of the planet
shifted its gaze away from the sun, and then the shimmering green
curtains of the aurora borealis lit up the sky, as cosmic rays,
directed by the earth's magnetic field, slammed into the
atmosphere above us.
The earliest oilsands development started after World War I,
when Canadian government surveyor, Sidney Ells, mapped the
richest Sands deposits, and Karl Clark of the University of
Alberta worked on extracting 100 percent clean bitumen and
building the first pilot plants.
The need for oil and asphalt exploded in the twenties, as
the automobile came of age and the Sands soon lured in various
wealth seekers, including a group of New York City policemen who
were convinced the Athabasca forest hid an enormous oil field.
They lost their shirts. The North West Company Ltd., an Imperial
Oil subsidiary, drilled a few wells in the Sands and found
nothing. A Prince Edward Island promoter named Robert Fitzsimmons
set up a small bitumen plant and sold barrels of the stuff to
hardware stores as roof tar.
The first serious investor in the Sands was an enigmatic
American geologist named Max Ball, who had advised Shell, Esso,
and the White House, and was author of a lively bestseller called
"This Fascinating Oil Business." With some partners from Toronto,
he built a small plant that actually produced diesel fuel and
gasoline. The Canadian government took it over as a wartime
reserve to supply U.S. troops in Alaska. Interest lagged after
World War II, but with U.S. reserves starting to decline and
"peak oil" worries rising, it took a Philadelphia oilman named J.
Howard Pew, head of the Sun Oil Company, to make the final leap
to large-scale production. His Great Canadian Oil Sands (GCOS)
mine, which opened on September 30, 1967, burned through over
$250 million before it started making a profit. Today run by
Suncor Energy, the GCOS was the world's first complex dedicated
to mining oil sands and upgrading bitumen into synthetic crude
oil.
In the 1970s, OPEC and the oil crisis caused prices to
balloon, and suddenly the Sands made a lot more sense. The
governments of Alberta and Canada also wanted a bite of the
bonanza, and started an escalating ten-year war for control that
saw the creation of government oil companies - Alberta Energy
Company and Petro-Canada - and then a terrible collapse of
business when the world price for oil plunged.
But the crisis pushed the companies in the Sands to innovate
in order to get costs down, and when the happy days returned,
their profits mushroomed.
The riches of the Sands also brought the U.S. to the
freetrade table, something Canada had been urging for a century.
The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement gave the U.S. the petroleum
price and supply security it needed, and the two countries agreed
not to bring in any tax or duty that would favor one country over
the other. Either party could bring in energy supply restrictions
or price hikes as long as it kept the same price or percentage of
supply for the other party. The 1994 North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) went even further, limiting export/import
restrictions, keeping the proportion of energy exports relative
to total supply, and avoiding dual pricing.
The Sands came of age in the early 1990s, when the new
Alberta Premier, Ralph Klein, took most of the brakes off
oilsands development. Canada soon had three major mines in
operation, and suddenly the country had joined the exclusive club
of energy superpowers.
A former newspaper reporter and Liberal mayor of Calgary,
Ralph Klein was no green groupie, and under his fourteen-year
reign the oilsands business barreled ahead. Generous write-offs
and a new tax and royalty rate led to the spending of billions of
dollars a year. It was, perhaps, the biggest industrial boom in
Canadian history. In a part of the country used to boom and bust,
the governing mantra was "make hay while the sun shines."
While oilsands mining went flat out, Klein and the companies
also directed a whole whack of money toward oilsands research,
mainly at the universities of Calgary and Alberta, but also on
site, where oilsands operators invested in automating production,
and in improving water recycling and heat exchange bit by bit.
All this research cash soon gave birth to a raft of new
technology startups that tried to exploit promising patents and
innovations. The greatest of all of these new inventions was SAGD
(pronounced SAG-D), which is turning into one of the key
breakthroughs in energy history.
But the good times had a downside. The tailing ponds of the
mines grew wider, and the companies slacked off on their promises
to reclaim the mined land, so that today, the governments are
forcing the oil companies to play an expensive game of catch up.
The tailing ponds also alarmed many environmental groups,
including Alberta's Pembina Institute, who expressed concern
about leakage into the Athabasca River or even the breaching of a
dyke, which could seriously damage the entire Athabasca-Mackenzie
River watercourse. A doctor downriver at Fort Chipewyan found
rare cancers that he suggested could be caused by toxic compounds
leaking from the ponds. While an Alberta enquiry absolved the
Sands' operators, the issue is still a "he said-she said" battle.
The issue needs further research, and matters are complicated by
the fact that there are also four pulp mills upstream from the
mines as well.
What really changed the attitude of many citizens toward the
Sands was the rapid growth of a movement against global warming
caused by the burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon
dioxide (CO2). The fascinating thing, and one I devote a chapter
to in this book, is why the Sands, a bit player among emitters,
became such a symbol for the environmentalists, when other CO2
sources are far more significant. The story has many twists and
turns, but inevitably comes down to money and power. A lot of
individuals and groups directly benefit by focusing on the Sands,
and ignoring other global warming villains.
So suddenly, it was "Tar Wars" time, as the Sands morphed
into something akin to the kingdom of Mordor in Tolkein's "Lord
of the Rings," and a talisman for sophisticated attacks on the
energy business as a whole.
The world's biggest industrial project started to attract
world-class attention in about 2005. At one end of the spectrum,
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett jetted up to the Athabasca in the
summer of 2008 to check on their investments. At the other end,
the Sands were visited regularly by Greenpeace eco-warriors,
eager to hang their banners on heavy haulers. Soon, a succession
of green groups were making the pilgrimage to Fort McMurray and
flying over the Sands, so they could report back on the
devastation done by the world's ugliest mines.
The mainstream green groups were determined to portray the
extraction of oil from the Sands as bad for the environment, and
some went as far as to demonize the Sands as a modern day Mordor
for questing green hobbits. Why? Because in reality, trashing the
tar patch shored up their fundraising activities and helped their
bottom line. The Sands are monumentally ugly, and they are far
enough away from big population centers so donors can't look too
closely at the message. Besides, "Blame Canada" is a tried and
true slogan in the U.S.
All this attention led Al Gore and others to ramp up the
demonization of the Sands even further. In a speech in Toronto in
the fall of 2009, Gore pulled out all the stops saying that, "the
oil sands threaten our survival as a species."
So what's with the apocalyptic language? Who is benefiting
from these over-the-top attacks? And what are the oilsands
companies doing to combat the counter the demonization?
In this book I argue that the oilsands companies are ill
prepared to fight what has turned out to be the mother of all
pubic relations battles. The Sands have become the poster child
for "environmental Armageddon," but the companies have little
response. They take a reactive rational approach when what they
are facing is nothing less than a new religion determined to
defeat them in a last battle, a "Tarmageddon" if you will.
Apart from the young hearts and rich foundations arrayed
against them, the Sands operators are also facing a growing and
formidable phalanx of new companies determined to tithe the
energy industry and use tax breaks to build alternative and
sustainable energy projects.
In some ways, global warming is just a sideshow......
But the demonization continues, and now it is Canada that is
under the spotlight. The country "is the dirty old man of the
climate world," according to a recent Guardian article. The most
pious of the global warming pundits, George Monbiot, wrings his
hands when he thinks of what a nasty country Canada has become:
"When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The
world's peace-keeper, the friendly nation, a liberal
counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern
neighbor, decent, civilized, fair, well-governed? Think
again. This country's government is now behaving with all
the sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party.
I am watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful,
cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petrostate ...
Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating
from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a
single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest
commodity known to man.
Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to
sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United
States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we
can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will
outweigh a century of good works ..."
Various diplomats have taken up Monbiot's moaning cry,
calling for Canada's expulsion from organizations like the
Commonwealth because it failed to meet its commitments under the
1997 Kyoto Cimate Change Treaty. But neither have the Europeans,
in spite of some creative climate accounting, emissions trading,
land-use changes, and carbon offsets.....
Polls still show that most people in Canada don't buy the
demonization and support continuing to work the Sands. U.S. and
British pollsters are also finding out that "climate fatigue" and
the recession have combined to cause the global warming scare to
retreat down to the very bottom of peoples' concerns.
Stepping back from the spin, it struck me that perhaps all
these attacks and the demonization of Canada and its oilsands
bonanza are one way of distracting Americans and Europeans from
the problems in their own back yard. U.S. coal-fired electricity
(some of which is sold to Ontario) is immensely more polluting,
and produces forty-four times more CO2 than the Athabasca
projects. Mountaintop removal in the Appalachians does far more
damage than tailings ponds in the Athabascsa.....
The shame of it is, we have real pollution, starvation, and
public health issues that desperately need to be solved, and we
may have just wasted fifteen or twenty years and billions of
dollars that could have been used to attack these problems.
Instead, we have green evangelists urging us to accept carbon
taxation as a real solution, when we should be changing to hybrid
vehicles, demanding higher mileage, teleconferencing instead of
using jet planes, and saving energy rather than wasting it. We
have been programmed to obsess about global warming and spend
fortunes on controlling minuscule temperature variations, when we
should be making simple lifestyle choices to reduce pollution in
general.
In spite of all the spin people are exposed to today, and
growing climate fatigue, there is still a definite will to
improve the environmental footprint of Canada's oilsands
industry, diminish the tailings problem, and restore a scarred
landscape. And this is finally being dealt with, as I detail
later in this book.
Global warming has been a lucrative crisis for certain
sectors for the past twenty years, and nourished whole
generations of policymakers, interest groups, and organizations
that thrive through public fundraising. For many people, the
argument mirrors the debate in their own souls between the green
of the earth and the bonanza of wealth we enjoy from using fossil
fuels. But now we're seeing an entirely new energy scare emerging
to take the focus off pollution and global warming. It's another
issue that its devotees say threatens human civilization itself -
the phenomenon of peak oil.
Back in the 1980s, I was told by a prominent Alberta oilman
that there was more oil in Alberta than in the entire Middle
East. It turns out we have quite a bit more - over 1 trillion
barrels that is recoverable, 3.3 trillion barrels in total. So
why are we wringing our hands about peak oil?'
The peak oil theory was first put forward in the 1950s by
Shell's lead geologist, King Hubbert, who made the shocking
prediction that U.S. conventional oil output would peak in the
early 1970s, and thereafter decline, making the U.S. increasingly
dependent on foreign oil. Hubbert was right on the money about
America, formerly the world's number-one oil exporter, but he was
wrong in his other prediction - global oil production would taper
off after 2000. But only because he lacked clear statistics and
did not factor in Canada's Athabasca Sands. He also did not
factor in 3 billion new players - the Chinese and the Indians -
who were not in the market until the year 2000.
It all depends on what you mean by "peak." Outside fortress
North America, the oil business is still a "Mad Max" kind of
world, with supply scrambling to meet demand, with bullies,
dictators, and thugs holding sway over cowering citizens, and
with national oil companies (NOCs) used as personal banks by the
local ruling kleptocracy. At the same time, oil-poor nations like
China and India are thumbing their noses at UN-mandated emissions
targets and enthusiastically adopting a fossil-fuel-based
lifestyle.
Some petro-pessimists, including those who also buy into
global warming, tell us with the utmost confidence that the
crunch is already here, and we're entering a real age of scarcity
on the road to ruin. They say our fossil fuel civilization is
toast, because world crude oil production has passed its peak,
and we're not finding enough oil to replace what we're consuming.
Even most oil analysts still maintain the strange fiction that
the Athabasca Sands are second only to Saudi Arabia in
recoverable oil reserves. This fiction persists in the face of
growing evidence that the Athabasca Sands are far larger. A
trillion barrels of synthetic crude is four times greater than
Saudi Arabia's 250 billion-odd barrels of conventional oil, and
the 175 billion barrels that the International Energy Agency
estimates for Canada as a whole.
For many Americans, Hubbert's peak oil theory is a
terrifying prospect and one that could rock their whole way of
life. For others, the scenario is pleasing, because our seemingly
insatiable demand for fossil fuel is morally wrong and scarcity
will force us to switch to windmills and biomass for fuel.
Suddenly, new horizontal drilling technology has ridden to
the rescue, giving the world a gas glut and an elegant new way to
exploit heavy oil and oilsands deposits. Roger Butler's SAGD
means another 100 or so years of energy security that we never
thought we had.
Now, many people attracted to the peak oil crusade are
lowering their placards and going home. The apocalypse has been
put off for at least another century. Energy economists have
suddenly discovered that Hubbert's Peak is just a ragged plateau
- that scarylooking downward roller-coaster slope of Hubbert's
bell curve has significantly flattened out.
The Sands of the Athabasca will help insulate us from the
shock of temporarily higher prices. The Sands are also a lifeline
for North America and the rest of the world, until we engineer
technology that can tap the powerful radiation of the sun.
Still, the threat that one day the planet's oil resources
will run dry is very real, and it's obvious we have to work
toward true energy independence. But the rewards of getting there
are great we'll finally be free of the peak oil threat, price
manipulation by dictators and scoundrels, soaring and crashing
oil prices and the roller-coaster ride of booms and recessions,
and the risks of famine and petro-conflict. The U.S., in
particular, will free itself of having to spend up to $2 billion
each and every working day to buy imported crude.
The blessing of the Sands is that they give us the luxury of
time. After the oil shocks of the past thirty years, the Sands
give us the chance to plan what I describe as the "Blue Shift,"
to adopt new power technologies and get to the other side of any
energy security minefield the world may have to cross.
So what are the best ways to make the Blue Shift, and how do
we get there?
Smart investors like Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha,
are already preparing their portfolios for the Blue Shift.
Buffett, who believes all cars on the road in 2030 will be
electric, has already invested in a Chinese company working on
the technology to make it happen. "Blue is the new green" and
blue is where the future lies.
We're a race that runs on oil. A cheap supply of energy,
first wood and wind, then coal, and now oil and gas, has given
humanity a whole new way of life. With some exceptions, the Age
of Oil has given us countless blessings, but the wells of fossil
fuel will one day run dry. We have probably a fifty-year window
of security made possible by reserves like Canada's oilsands. But
even before that time, even in the next decade or two, we should
be able to make what I call the Blue Shift into an abundant new
energy future.
U.S. futurist Ray Kurzweil has a theory that innovation
proceeds on an exponentially rising curve and that we are well
into the curve for getting economical energy from the sun.
Applying his Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil calmly
predicts that solar nanotechnology will produce all the energy
needs of Earth's people in just twenty years. "If we could
convert .03 percent of the sunlight that falls on the earth into
energy," he says, "we would meet all of our projected needs for
2030."
Many people are now getting the point that solar energy
freedom is just around the corner. Blue post-environmental
activism is now emerging and it's not just a word shift from
green to blue. Tens of billions of dollars are being invested in
blue research and development, in a race to come up with the
cheap and scalable clean energy that we need. You can see it in
California where most of the world's trends start - savvy venture
capital companies in Silicon Valley are shifting their focus from
computing to renewable energy, the cheap generation of electric
power, and, of course, super cool battery-powered vehicles like
the Tesla. That's where the future is, and that's where the fun
can be found.
The emerging Blue Shift should take us gracefully out of the
age of oil, and usher in an era of super abundance right out of a
science fiction novel. It's perhaps ironic that solar energy will
eventually replace crude oil and natural gas as the fuel that
powers the world, but we should be thankful that plentiful
hydrocarbon resources like those found in the Sands will let us
make the transition without stress and violence, without the risk
of apocalypse, or the collapse of liberal democracy.
The major danger in the shift to blue is having enough
petroleum to keep fueling the global agricultural revolution so
that we can avoid the specter of large-scale famine. World food
production today is heavily linked to fossil fuels and inorganic
fertilizer. The biggest risk right now is not peak oil; it's
maintaining the equilibrium, and we must do it by ensuring the
production of secure energy supplies and food at a reasonable
price, and by ramping up solar technology. This is no time to be
taxing carbon and shoving people into poverty. That issue should
wait until climate science is more settled.
You would think that the arrival of nanosolar and other blue
technologies could put Canada's synthetic crude on the road to
obsolescence. But things never happen that quickly. Synthetic
crude from the Sands is just a great insurance policy for North
Americans and an immense future resource for petrochemicals and
other uses of fossil energy.
Even if you're the most dedicated of climate lemmings, ready
to follow Al Gore anywhere, you'll have to agree with me that we
need to make a smooth transition from the Age of Oil to the new
Solar Era. The Sands will help us get there.
One hundred years ago, as the Age of Oil was just beginning,
Canadian drillers working for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company
(today's BP), struck the first oil in the Middle East at Masjid-e
Soleiman in present-day Iran. One hundred years ago, an Ontario
driller named Eugene Coste spudded the first gas well in Alberta.
And one hundred years ago, a passionate young Canadian government
geologist named Sidney Ells arrived in the Athabasca Valley to do
an inventory of the Sands and bring out samples for study. Today,
a century later, we are poised to enter another more permanent
energy' era, the Solar Age, and we'll get there easily, with the
help of an ocean of bitumen.......
.........
This book "Black Bonanza" by Sweeny is indeed fancinating. It
gives the true picture of the Alberta/Saskatchewan oil sands,
that will give the world time to move into space-age energy in a
smooth transition. The truth of the matter is we are at this
present time (2010) dependant on oil and gas to fuel our modern
world. The shift to green/blue energy is coming, it is making
progress, but to do it with the least worldwide upheaval, the
reserves of the Canadian Oil Sands are the answer, and will make
the transition relatively painless.
Mankind has proved over the last 100 years that when he knows he
must make changes to our way of life, to restore and preserve our
planet, the sea, the lakes, the rivers, the air, we do have the
mind-set, we do have the will, we do have the technology, to
rescue ourselves.
Take "recycling" as one example. It was first the average person
who got on the recycling ship - more and more as the years moved
on. Then it was cities and towns - with the sidewalk recycling
bins, at least in the Western world.
Another example: when I was a child growing up in England, the
industry smoke billowed out of industry smoke-stacks, polluting
the air and blackening buildings. Now industry smoke is not
allowed - green-belts have been established. Sand-blasting of
dirty buildings was undertaken and now England is green and
clean.
David Suzuki and Holly Dressel have updated and published their
book "MORE GOOD NEWS" showing real solutions to the global eco-
crisis are being met. We are moving to save our beautiful blue
planet.
The end of this age, and the coming of the age to come, is NOT
going to be the destruction of ourselves from pollution per se or
from the use of oil and gas. Yes, we could have done things
differently over especially the last 60 years. We could have kept
ourselves more organic, we could have moved into space-age
technology sooner than we are doing. But the facts are what we
find the facts are. It can do little good to cry over spilt milk
as they say. Mankind is seeing what we must now do to keep this
lovely planet clean and livable for all people. And we are moving
in the right directions. As Alastair Sweeny has pointed out, the
Oil Sands of Canada will give us time to make the transition into
space-age energy as painless and as smooth as possible.
A fine book by Sweeny - I recommend you have it in your personal
library for your family and/or your friends - a good balanced
overall view of Canada's Oil Sands.
Keith Hunt
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