Comment by jseutter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jseutter | Hacker News Reader

For context, Alberta oil sands have an energy ratio of about 4 to 1, meaning it takes one barrel of oil to produce 4 barrels. The world average is about 17 to 1 with your typical Saudi oil about 40:1. It's difficult to describe what this stuff is like if you haven't seen it. It's essentially a stiff tar that soaked into sand. One of the techniques for refining it (not sure if still used) consisted of importing good oil from the US to dilute it up to a minimum standard so it can be sold. A current technique like mentioned in the article is to heat up the formation with steam until it gets hot enough so that it starts to flow. They use natural gas to heat the steam, so it's essentially a scheme to turn natural gas into oil, but with pollution added to the mix.

What works for monitoring in other basins is obviously insufficient for the oil sands, so it's good to see the federal government funding these sorts of studies. It will likely lead to better monitoring and reporting regulations, but the Alberta government will likely scream that a Trudeau is trying to f** us over once again. The last time in the 80s was plain protectionism, while this is protectionism for a much better reason.

I love my province, but man, are we stupid sometimes.

The oil produced mostly gets shipped to the US, where we sell it at a discount because it's crappy quality. This in turns helps the US pollute more but save dollars in the process. Oil sands oil makes up about 14% of US oil consumption.

If I was dictator of Alberta, I wouldn't do anything to stop production, I would just make a law that any production energy has to come from renewable, non-carbon sources. It would generate a frenzy of research and development that hasn't been seen since the industrial revolution as people pant and salivate at all that money sitting in the ground. :)

I eventually decided I wouldn't work for oil companies any longer. If they want to do it, they'll have to do it without me. It has led me down a fun career path of working for companies I only dreamed about working for when I was in school.

Energy statistics by a partisan group, so numbers might be biased: https://sustainablesociety.com/research-material/oil-sands/

Energy stats worldwide: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> It's difficult to describe what this stuff is like if you haven't seen it.

I want to echo this point, because it gets talked about in the popular media like it's just another kind of garden variety crude oil, when it is anything but. For the curious, there are independent sellers (on ebay and elsewhere) who sell specimens of the stuff, along with samples of other kinds of raw fossil fuel and energy minerals. It's very helpful for demos and discussions like this one.

This stuff is almost literally road tar mixed with sand, almost like asphalt. It's difficult to break up by hand when cold, and when warm it has a tarry, putty-like texture. Contrast this with light-sweet crude, which is a pale yellow, gasoline-smelling liquid. Once you have a feel for these things, it doesn't take a leap of the imagination to grasp that the latter is going to take a lot less effort and energy to turn into useful products than the former!

I wouldn't call any oil sweet but you do you.

I think you were unaware, but light sweet crude is a term referring to a type of crude oil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_crude_oil

"Sweet" means low sulfur. It's a standard industry term.

How does it compare to the energy ratio of US fracking? It’s a similar process of using heated water (though not steam so maybe a greater volume of water) to break the oil from shale.

It uses a ton of water. I think more than oil sands so, if the oil sands displace some fracking it is a global net positive to have that substation.

About a decade ago I realized we are going to extract all the oil, no matter what. All we can do is try to slow the rate to give nature time to heal and maybe develop counter measures to pollution.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/25/climate/frack...

Producing oil from "tight" formations through fracking will not be displaced by oil sands production. It's just cheaper to run with much lower upfront cost. Hard to find numbers here, but scroll down to figure 5 here https://energynow.ca/2023/02/canadian-upstream-oil-sector-su...

Also: this page is really interesting generally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakken_formation

> we are going to extract all the oil, no matter what

4C warming is going to be toasty. Mind you, timescales matter; we don't have to extract all the oil now, this century, despite what drillers demand.

I wouldn’t mind to see a bit more of Peter Lougheed’s long-term thinking injected into Alberta’s governance these days.

> For context, Alberta oil sands have an energy ratio of about 4 to 1, meaning it takes one barrel of oil to produce 4 barrels.

They don't actually use oil to produce the oil though, do they? If they need heat it would be cheaper to use (say) natural gas.

Maybe there's a middle ground -- is the production subsidized? If so, drop the subsidies and let the market decide.

I like your idea better, but perhaps a softer touch might get more traction?

So production isn't really subsidized in the traditional sense. Producers actually pay quite a bit in royalties and taxes, and employ people, who also pay taxes. It's more about these externalities like pollution that aren't factored into the total cost of production. Alberta has oil, and when the price is high, oil producers pay top dollar for people, which sucks all the air out of the marketplace, and makes it really difficult for anyone not in oil to stay in business because their people just quit for more money. Then when the price drops, a bunch of people get laid off, some try to start businesses, and the whole cycle starts again. It's difficult to have a well-rounded economy in this situation.

I agree, there's probably a good reason I'm not dictator of Alberta. Several reasons, actually. Something something dehumanizing people something..

I guess letting the externalities go as a freebie could be considered a subsidy but I hear ya.

With that definition, a completely anarchic state would have subsidies all over the place. Sounds wrong.

Sounds exactly right to me.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Externality is a real concept and so are subsidies, but "failure to take action against some party imposing costs on others" doesn't amount to a subsidy of that activity

Like, if the government fails to crack down on illegal drug distribution and all its associated externalities, is that a subsidy? Where does it end? It's nonsense.

I don't think it makes sense to slice up society into tiny divisions and categorize each one like that. For example the government takes affirmative action to create the concept of land ownership and corporations. Those legal fictions then assist for example this polluter.

My whole point is advocating consistent definitions of words, not subdivision and special pleading.

I concur in principle in consistent word usage, but I'm not aware of one other than externalities for this issue, and that is too vague to convey the fact that public money is spent in support of their profit.

The War on Drugs helps subsidize the cartels and drug dealers by creating a market that only they can fulfill. We pay an obscene amount of money for sustaining that market.

It's semantics: instead of giving money directly to the organization, let them make money and have the public money be spent to clean up the mess they made. Same difference: private profit and public expenditure for it.

If you have seen it, Mordor is the closest thing in most people's mind that comes up.

> meaning it takes one barrel of oil to produce 4 barrels

This is a dumb statistic and doesn’t help prove a point. It can “take 3 barrels” to produce 2 and it would still be worth it because it doesn’t actually take 3 barrels. It takes the energy equivalent and the value of oil is the energy density with its portability.

Before non-fossil energy sources were significant, one of the points the statistic it proved was that peak oil scenarios hurt well before you "run out" of oil completely[0].

Today, the statistic is still relevant because we've got other ways to make energy-dense portable fuels from renewables.

[0] unless you can substitute oil for another energy source, which was only sometimes part of those discussions, the rest of the time it was "prepare for collapse!" with images from the original Mad Max films.

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