We’re not running out of oil
- June 25th, 2006
- Posted in SciTech
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But that doesn’t mean we should continue burning it constantly! The Alberta oil sands have a reserve of possibly 2 trillion barrels. That’s six times the reserve in Saudi Arabia, even of the Saudis are telling the truth. I take this as bad news since the average person will become more complacent about alternative technologies if there is no oil supply crisis.
Which leads me to the funniest quote I’ve heard all day. Jim Locke of Ft. McMurray (a lovely town of dust and pick-ups) drives the worlds largest dump truck at one of the big tarsands strip mines. What’s that like, Jim?
“You have 14 steps going up, and at my house you have 14 steps to the bedroom. So it’s like going upstairs in my house, sitting on my bed and driving the house downtown,” says Locke.
Interesting point about complacency, Evan. The oil industry to pushing this the other way as well: we’re running out, so you’d better let us drill in ANWAR and get on board the Tarsands Express.
Maybe it’s useful to think of this less as an oil crisis, and more as an energy crisis. Sure, we can get oil out of the tarsands… but those multiple billions of potential barrels are an illusion. Extracting a barrel from the tarsands requires a much bigger investment of energy than getting a barrel from more traditional reserves.
In the absence of an appetite for dramatic socialo and economic engineering, it comes down to how much people are willing to pay, and how much our collective governments are willing to subsidize oil production.
Currently we collectively subsidize highly profitable oil companies to a ridiculous degree. Just google “oil company subsidies” and you’ll see.
The market does work sometimes. If people have to pay the real cost of gas at the pump instead of sureptitiously through their tax bills, there will be a much higher demand for energy efficiency.
I believe in a multi-threaded approach to the energy/climate crisis. We do need to develop green technologies for long-term, and every incentive should be deployed to encourage that. Extinction does not seem to be enough of an incentive on its own, so we’ll have to throw in a free DVD player or something.
In the short term we also need to maximise efficiency of the technologies we have in order to reduce our immediate footprint.
We are currently at a tipping point, and at the risk of drawing the wrath of everyone including my grandmother, if we need to deploy more nuclear technology in the short-to-medium term to avert full-scale climate cascade, we should do so. Clearly nuclear fission is not a long-term strategy, but there are alternate reactor designs that do not melt down, and nuclear fuel can be much more efficiently consumed. Waste containment technologies have improved dramatically. Nuclear power is a great way to produce hydrogen in a manner that doesn’t just shift the greenhouse gas production profile further up the food chain.
As an added plus it would be good for Saskatchewan