Posted 6/23/2008

WILL GLOBAL WARMING STOP THE BIG OIL PROJECTS?

Everybody in Canada is really excited about the Alberta oil sands projects. Experts claim that Alberta has 1.3 trillion barrels of oil in those tar deposits. That's more than Saudi Arabia has. Canada is churning out a million barrels a day (mbd) and heading toward two million mbd by 2010. Maybe even 5 million mbd by 2020.

Now there is big enthusiasm in Western Colorado about oil shale. The experts claim there are over 1.2 trillion barrels of oil locked up in all that rocky shale. That's more oil than the Russians have in Siberia. But, unlike Canada, we are just getting back into shale. We tried in 1977, but the whole thing went bust in 1982 when Exxon pulled up stakes (about $5 billion) and got out of Dodge.

If the experts are right, we could become independent of all those Arab and South American tyrants.

But hold that enthusiasm. Global warming could put everybody out of business.

It works like this:

Most people have seen Giant and believe that you just drill a hole in the ground and oil shoots out. But drill a hole into oil sands and nothing shoots out of the ground. Drill a hole into oil shale and all you get is a little oily dust.

To solve the problem, the companies in Alberta have strip mined the oil sands close to the surface, then trucked the oil sands to a giant slurry operation where great quantities of water are used to separate the remaining bitumen (impure crude oil) out of the sands. It takes four tons of oil sands to produce one barrel of oil. And, most important, it requires two to four barrels of water separate a barrel of bitumen from the sand.

That's a lot of water. Scarce fresh water. (Salt water can't be used because it corrodes everything made of carbon steel.)

There are newer projects which inject steam into the ground to dissolve the oil sands and then pump the dissolved bitumen up out of the ground. At first this saves some on water, but really ups the energy cost of energy production. Eventually, pressures lessen as liquids leaves the earth and water must be pumped under the bitumen deposits to raise the heavy liquids for extraction.

How much water? Nobody knows just yet. But Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company, pumps four barrels of water into the ground to create the pressure necessary to extract one barrel of oil. (In 2004, Saudi Aramco pumped 38 million barrels of water per day into the desert to produce 10 million barrels of oil. The Saudis have spent untold billions on desalination and purification plants. Even so, they have drastically lowered their fragile aquifers.)

The point is that big time oil extraction requires big time water utilization.

Let look at Western Colorado, suffering years of drought with millions of acres of pine forests disappearing for want of water. According to firefighters, the moisture content of lumber yard boards is greater than the moisture content of Colorado's live trees. The onslaught of warmer temperatures has greatly enlarged the beetle population, which kills the pines that don't die of thirst first.

The Colorado River no longer flows uninterruptedly from source to mouth. In one place I visited, I saw the entire river leave its bed to flow into and through a power plant, then out the other end to rejoin the river bed and continue on its westward course.

Making things worse, global warming is threatening the snow pack which fuels Colorado's ski resorts. Ski operators are warning that the snow pack in Colorado could decrease by about 50 percent by 2085. Making artificial snow becomes more difficult and more costly when the temperature rises above 25 degrees. But most important, it is this melting snow pack which supplies water to Colorado's rivers and streams.

And if little water gets to the oil shale areas of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, how will the companies mount large scale oil projects? No one has attempted to estimate how much water will be needed to produce a barrel of shale oil. But almost every one agrees with the phrase "a significant amount."

Does that mean four barrels of water to produce one barrel of shale oil? Or one barrel?

Regardless of the number, will any water be available as Colorado continues to warm?

If a barrel of water becomes more precious than a barrel of oil, what will happen to those big oil shale dreams?

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