Letting Go of the Tar (Sands) Baby

A tar sands mine and plant near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. The recipe is simple: scrape the skin off the earth, boil what you find, wash the residue, dilute it with explosive fluids and send it 3,000 miles to where someone can make an inferior product with it. For some reason, the business model isn’t working. (Wikipedia Photo)

A tar sands mine and plant near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. The recipe is simple: scrape the skin off the earth, boil what you find, wash the residue, dilute it with explosive fluids and send it 3,000 miles to where someone can make an inferior product with it. For some reason, the business model isn’t working. (Wikipedia Photo)

Just as is the case in the American tight (shale) oil plays, things in the Canadian tar sands are breaking down fast, and for the same reason: wringing the last few barrels of oil out of the earth is proving to be far more expensive than hoped. Two weeks ago the Norwegian energy giant Statoil postponed for at least three years building a new tar sands project designed to pump 40,000 barrels a day; earlier this year Total SA of France, the fifth-largest oil company in the world, suspended operations at its $10 billion oil sands mine while it tries to figure out a way to make a profit; and Shell announced in February indefinite suspension of work on a prospective 200,000-barrel-a-day mine. (The same Shell that has been quietly folding its 13-billion-dollar hand in the US shale-oil bonanza and tiptoeing from the building? Yes, the very same.) Continue reading

Energy Industries Rush to Sell Out Their Country

1252 people were arrested for demonstrating against a proposed tar-sands pipeline from Canada. Meanwhile, the real crimes wre being committed elsewhere. (Photo by tarsandsaction/flickr)

The most real and present danger to the security — indeed, the survival — of the United States is the advent of peak oil (the time when the oil-producing nations’ declining output can no longer meet the rising demand of the oil-consuming nations). The condition is imminent (even Forbes Magazine admits the possibility: “Has Peak Oil Come To The Non-Opec World? Maybe.”) and its effects will be catastrophic. The sudden absence, or extreme cost, of a substance whose abundance and cheapness provide the foundation of our entire economy can hardly be imagined. So the American energy industry, aided and abetted by its wholly-owned politicians, is doing everything possible to make it worse. Continue reading