Oil Sands Mining Uses Up Almost as Much Energy as It Produces

That article is not good. Biased reporting based on a biased study. Yes, all writing is biased, but sometimes evidence suggests it's worse than usual, and this is one of those cases. From the cradle of the study to the grave of your mind, everything in the chain producing this article has a clear bias.

Study: Published by the "Post Carbon Institute". They're not even trying.

Article: Written by an author whose only credentials are a pretty face and a B.Sc. in biology. Can she spot bad stats? Probably not. Is she likely to take any damning claim about the oil sands the study makes at face value without a second thought? Yes.

Publisher: insideclimatenews.org. They're a little more cagey about revealing their biases than the Post Carbon Institute, which is to say they're still about as subtle as a club to the head.

Now, don't get me wrong. I live close to the oil sands and will pay a greater price than most reading this for that oil. I am not in the O&G industry, but I have deep concerns about how the oilsands are being extracted. Specifically, groundwater seepage from tailings ponds is probably one of the nastiest local consequences. Perhaps even more concerning is that accountability is going down as foreign ownership climbs. Just as no Hollywood blockbuster makes money on paper these days, my concern is that once the oilsands are no longer commercially viable, parent companies will quietly abscond with the profits while the oilsands companies go bankrupt and fail to follow through on the long-term cleanup that will be necessary.

However, all this is no excuse for giving a pass to blatantly biased articles. When we give attention to articles such as this it detracts attention from well-researched independent studies reported on by people who actually have the chops to spot bad stats and tease apart biased studies. It makes those who are against oilsands development look like a bunch of clueless tree-hugging hippies!

"Hall, who wasn't involved in Hughes' study, thinks the EROI for oil sands would fall closer to 1:1 if the tar sands' full life cycle—including transportation, refinement into higher quality products, end use efficiency and environmental costs—was taken into account."

If his statement is true and it costs the same amount of fuel it produces, the overall cost would exceed the revenue on a variable basis and it would not be profitable to mine oil at any price.

The exception to this would be if NG is so abundant that we are burning it since it can't be sold (happens in ND), then using it to refine oil makes sense.

One does not have to resort to theoretical environmental cost calculations to conclude that ethanol uses up more energy than it produces. Yet I do not see insideclimatenews.org complaining about the sheer bulk of fossil fuels it takes to produce ethanol.

A ratio of 3:1 doesn't strike me as "almost as much energy as it produces." Would you say that if I gave you $3 for every $1 you gave me?